Where Is the Future of Criticism? Online Platforms and Literary Discussion

9:15-9:30am

Welcome and opening remarks

Richard Jones, Alex Tickell, Edmund King, and Shafquat Towheed (The Open University)

9.30–10.30am

Keynote

Simone Murray (Monash University, Australia)

"Literary Theory from Below: Representations of High School English in Recent Popular Fiction"

Abstract: Literary analysis currently flourishes outside of formal academic settings: celebrity book clubs; bookish social-media communities; and para-academic seminar programs---whether face-to-face or online.  Reader studies has, for some two decades now, embraced such communities.  Yet literary studies as a whole still shuns English’s largest interpretive community---high-school subject-English.  Some form of English is compulsory throughout schooling in most Anglophone nations, yet academic literary studies characterises it as intellectually simplistic, interpretively jejune, and professionally retrograde. 

Leaving high-school English solely to Education faculties is a grave mistake for academic literary studies.  This keynote address explores what literary theory looks like when disseminated to the broadest public via mass-education secondary settings.  Taking a leaf out of social historians’ book, this is literary theory viewed not from the lofty heights of the academic seminar room, but from the desks of the high-school classroom ‘below’.  I propose the concept of ‘the canary in the classroom’: analysing literary theory as it has diffused through high-school settings foregrounds dominant literary theories’ limitations, blind-spots and unjustified assumptions.

I ground this analysis by close reading two twenty-first-century novels depicting sexually predatory high-school English teachers: Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa (2020) and Alissa Nutting’s Tampa (2013).  Both depict teachers who use literature to groom, seduce and maintain lopsided sexual relationships with under-age students.  Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) is a key intertext for both novels, except that in Tampa the gender roles have been reversed as a female teacher seduces a 14-year-old male middle-schooler.

Both novels disrupt easy assumptions about the innately ‘liberatory’ character of the identity-politics brands of literary theory which have dominated the discipline for the last half century.  The case-studies demonstrate that any consideration of a particular literary theory must attend not only to its concepts and methods, but also to the particulars of its institutionalisation.

10:30-11:00am

Morning Break

11:00-12:00pm

Panel One

Tara Heffernan (Palm Springs School for Social Research)

"The Australianisation of Intellectual Life"

In 1899, the Australian poet Henry Lawson wrote an article for The Bulletin in which he advised Australian writers to either leave the country or kill themselves. Made more acute by an artistic life marked by “every disadvantage arising from poverty and lack of education,” this bleak outlook has resonated with many hampered by the philistinism of Australian letters. Though Australia still suffers from accusations of provincialism, today, the centre suffers the same anti-intellectualism as the periphery. The publishing industry's problems are well documented. Across the Anglosphere, humanities departments disregard the canon for politically approved art and "job-ready” skills. The conditions Lawson believed peculiar to Australia have become characteristic of the Anglosphere as a whole. 

Taking Australia as a telling microcosm of our present cultural decline, this paper examines the emergence of a self-consciously “heterodox,” typically male figure across what’s been dubbed the “Ausnaissance” literary milieu, and Australia's slacker art scene (both reliant on online dissemination and shitposting), considering both the possibilities and limitations of his critique of contemporary literary and artistic life and counter modes of cultural production against a feminised, puritanical mainstream.

Emmett Stinson (Edith Cowan University, Australia)

"Highbrow BookTube: Literary Criticism on YouTube"

There has been an enormous amount of attention given to the rise of bookish media on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube as affective forms of engagement with popular and middlebrow literature. However, what has been less frequently considered has been the rise of purposefully intellectual and complex reviewing content across these formats. Unlike the affective, short videos on BookTok, Highbrow BookTube foregrounds its intellectual leanings with long-form content that is explicitly un-sharable, resisting the formal platform logics of social media. For example, the YouTube channel, Leaf by Leaf, which has 46,500 followers, posted a ten-hour and seven-minute video detailing a reading of William Gass’ The Tunnel in December of 2024. This paper examines the function of Highbrow BookTube within the broader contexts of bookish social media and provides an account of Leaf by Leaf as an exemplar of this form.

12:00-13:00pm

Lunch Break

13:00-14:00pm

Panel Two

Aakriti Mandhwani (Shiv Nadar University, India)

"Reading the Romance in the Time of Substack"

I enter these conversations as a print historian with an interest in the popular and genre fiction. I ask, what literary critical tools can forums like Substack provide to understand, categorise and locate genre fiction? What role does speed of dissemination play in a discussion around genre fiction? Finally, do such platforms expand possibilities of who gets to speak about contemporary genre fiction, or replicate what New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka terms the “filterworld” which, as Substack writer Giulia Riva (with more than 3000 subscribers) writes, is "the world in which algorithmic recommendations don’t expand our tastes so much as flatten them, nudging us constantly toward whatever is least disruptive, most palatable, least likely to make us click away"?

Substack writing is not only producing critique and reviews of genre fiction, but is also immensely market facing, with publishers, editors and publicists using the platform to discuss contemporary publishing trends as they unfold in real time. I propose to examine specifically the case of romance where, in an economy of thriving subgenres of romance that are constantly being birthed, platforms like Substack are becoming viable tools in the communications circuit facilitating the making and marketing of new fiction.

Finally, I approach these questions from the point of view of curation of critique. As co-editor of Indian Genre Fiction: Past and Future Histories (New York, Delhi: Routledge, 2018), we approached the question of genre and genre fiction more historically and contextually, arguing for linguistically and geographically situated terms of discourse to think about genre fiction. As a co-editor of a volume on Handbook of Contemporary Genre Fiction, currently in its conceptual stages, I also hope to bring some crucial questions that have emerged during the volume-in-making’s conceptualisation meetings to think about genre worlds where such linguistic divides are collapsing or are insufficient.

Samantha J. Rayner (University College London)

"Receipts from the Bookshop: Booksellers and Substack"

This year has seen the publication of a book, Receipts from the Bookshop, written by author and bookseller Katie Clapham (Phoenix, June 2026). It is based on her Substack of the same name and shows how booksellers are harnessing the longer form posts that Substack allows to engage with their readers in accessible and successful ways.  This paper explores how Katie Clapham and a few other UK indie booksellers are using the Substack medium, not only to create awareness of books of all kinds, but also to enable followers to contribute comments and funding, buying into these bookish online spaces in different ways than other online platforms, like BookTok, allows. Why is Substack becoming such a draw for booksellers and their readers?

14:30-15:30pm

Position paper

Hollis Robbins (University of Utah)

"Substack, Viewpoint Diversity, and the Future of the Humanities"

"Viewpoint diversity" has quickly developed into one of the more contested keywords in contemporary academia. Described by its proponents as a commitment to pluralism and free inquiry in the realm of ideas, it is viewed with suspicion by others as a mere ploy to embed conservatives in the institutions. This polarised reception mirrors certain unresolved tensions in the relationship between Substack and the contemporary humanities. Some optimists view Substack as a potential haven for the more demanding and idiosyncratic forms of criticism and commentary that find increasingly little purchase in the contemporary academy, a picture that accords with the stories that Substack likes to tell about itself. But can a platform like Substack really foster a sophisticated and sustainable culture of intellectual pluralism? To what extent are the possibilities for genuine diversity and freedom of intellectual exchange constrained by the subscription model and attention economy realities that underpin the current Substack platform? And how are they complicated by the accelerating realities of AI?

11.30–12.30pm

Panel One

James A. Smith (Royal Holloway, University of London)

"Online and Offline, with Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers, Patricia Lockwood and Ottessa Moshfegh"

This paper addresses the conference theme by noting that if, as the organisers hypothesise, meaningful criticism is now the preserve of 'online', this in some ways cuts against the consistent position about 'online' in contemporary literature. Presenting a reading of how the binary opposition of online and offline has developed in recent novels, this paper asks about how online critical communities interact with literature, when literature regards their very enabling media with suspicion.

Edmund G. C. King (The Open University)

"Cancel Culture and the Contemporary Novel"

The publishing industry in Britain and the US has lately been mired in a series of controversies about race, gender, and diversity, as well as by accusations in other quarters of group think, censorship, and “cancel culture.” 

One of the problems with analysing this phenomenon is that there is often little agreement about the meaning and significance of the controversies themselves. “Banned books” and “censorship” can mean different things to different people and there is some disagreement about the reality of “cancel culture” itself as a coherent concept. To unpack this phenomenon, this paper turns to a recent literary micro-genre that satirises professional dynamics in the publishing industry and art world, which for the sake of convenience I shall call “the cancel culture novel.” Focusing on works including Lexi Freiman’s Book of Ayn (2023), Emmalea Russo’s Vivienne (2024), and Jordan Castro’s The Novelist (2022), it asks how they depict the mechanics of online cancel culture and, more speculatively, what forms of cultural politics they might be advancing by doing so.

12.30–1.00pm

Break

1.00–1.30pm

Paper

Michael F. Miller (University of Amsterdam)

"Bernard Stiegler’s 'Quarrel of the Amateurs': Experts, Amateurs, Bots and the Future of Criticism"

In a lesser-known essay from 2017 titled “The Quarrel of the Amateurs,” the late philosopher of technology Bernard Stiegler rehearses the 18th-century conflict between Denis Diderot and the Count de Caylus regarding the necessary faculties required to judge artworks. Stiegler shows how the object of critical analysis for both of these “amateurs” is quietly displaced from the artwork (as an interest-generating object) to the critic’s own interest in the aesthetic as such. Stiegler argues that this double movement of interest as both engine of speculative finance and aesthetic judgment signals the decomposition of criticism into cultivated philistinism. The essay’s provocation is one that resonates with us today: while the cultivated philistine’s - or amateur’s - judgment of an artwork as “interesting” might express some degree of learning and taste, we should also keep in mind that it may function as an interest-generating pronouncement that serves one’s own class interests. As “interest” and “interesting” become historical and conceptual markers of sophistication, the now ascendent style of the amateur/philistine dyad becomes defined by the opposition between technicity and passion/affect (on this latter point see Aarthi Vadde’s work on “amateur creativity”). As always, what’s at stake for Stiegler in this historical anecdote is “the writing apparatus” itself and the degree that it should be “mobilized in the formation of public taste.” In our media-ecological situation, the professional writer is overtaken by the amateur-as-fan, while critical distance gives way to aesthetic attachment as sanctioning form of epistemic legitimacy. 

With Stiegler’s essay providing an historical and theoretical framework for reassessing recent accounts of the figure of “the amateur” in - and author of - contemporary literary/cultural criticism as it takes shape across a wide variety of platforms and discursive environments on Web 2.0, my talk begins from the simple premise that the disciplinary formation of “literary studies” in the present has much to gain from a more robust theory of media and mediation. From McLuhan to the “post-digital” condition of today’s soon-to-be-automated literary-critical production, it is clear that literature–as both medium and professional object of study–has become inextricably mediated by ubiquitous networks of information and technology. Yet what’s conspicuously absent from many recent accounts of literary studies’ imbrication with technical media is any rigorous attempt to think through the media-theoretical implications of such an encounter. Instead, while interest-generating discussions abound on social media and tenured professors’ subscription-based Substacks over “close reading” and other topics Simon During identifies as part of the little-c conservative turn in the discipline, literary scholars have failed to theorize this encounter with media at their own peril. 

This presentation asks: why is there so little attention paid within the discipline to specific artifacts of technical media? And how does the new “writing apparatus” of Web 2.0 change the relation between professional and amateur criticism? Does the future of literature belong to the amateurs, the philistines, or the experts? Or does it belong to the bots? And how might a critical theory of media help us tell the difference?.

1.30–2.30pm

Break

2.30–3.30pm

Panel Two

Udith Dematagoda (Hyperidean Press)

"The Middling Morass"

The most comprehensive tendencies in contemporary culture are unequivocally middlebrow - less improving or "challenging" and more "affirming" of subjective deficiencies. Criticism is at an impasse, where it can continue along the path of confected and self-congratulatory media inspired mediocrity or it can create a rupture, ushering in a new era of acerbic - but authentic - critical culture that is detached from professional managerial class status games and "power brokerage" and unafraid to be honest.

Jeffrey Lawrence (Rutgers University)

"The Millennial’s Dilemma"

I want to talk about the specific challenges that literary scholars under 45 have faced in the academy since the 2008 financial crisis. With a rapidly contracting academic job market and a narrowing of ideological parameters for academic scholarship, many millennial critics/intellectuals have turned to mainstream and para-academic venues to publish their work. As those venues themselves have entered into crisis, Substack seems like the logical landing place for literary critics seeking a broader public audience. Is it in fact that place? The paper will be exploratory rather than argumentative. I want to elaborate the generational problem and then think through what Substack offers and what it lacks.

3.30–4.00pm

Break

4.00–5:00pm

Position paper

Sarah Brouillette (Carleton University)

"Substack and the Feminization of Publishing"

Substack’s rise reflects and reinforces the pressures of ambient media engagement, content production, and self-promotion that characterize our era of diminishing opportunities for work with traditional print media firms. At the same time, Substack serves as an outlet for conversations about precisely these pressures, as people come to the platform looking for ways to understand their own struggles in the creative industries and seeking advice about how they might continue. My paper will discuss the emergence and function for literary Substack of a particular narrative about how publishing has changed. This narrative associates a lost era of male dominance with the production of prestigious and challenging quality fiction that deserved its acclaim, while the contemporary era is said to be characterized by media hype and trends, and by an accompanying decline in literary standards, resulting in the over-production of easy writing that provides therapeutic comforts rather than challenging the reader.

The nostalgic ideal of literary Substack, with a masculine aesthetic excellence pitched against today’s mainstream commercial publishing, provides readers with a way of connecting their own struggles to a common plight. The understanding of industry transformation is a particular one, however, which ultimately tends toward analysis of symptoms, such as women making up more of the workforce. It loses sight of the several mutually reinforcing processes that are underlying what is happening today: the flight of value from the industry, the machinations of platform capitalism, and the intensification and cheapening of creative work—all things that Substack itself benefits from and reinforces.

But explanations of the industry’s transformation that are pitched against the growing dominance of women in publishing, personal writing and bibliotherapy, and DEI, generate debate via angry “restacks” and an excited comment section, featuring considerable personal rancour and mean-spirited polarization—mirroring the tendencies, in other words, of the same social media to which Substack’s founders claim it is superior. In an echo of Substack’s own branding, the literary Substack community positions itself as a refuge for the intellectually minded, where people can go to find mature connection and deliberative discourse that transcend political divisions. But the platform’s economic model and algorithmic biases end up preferring charged, reactive content anyway, and intellectual figures who dominate there tend to play the old sensationalist games, using gender and identity politics as clickbait fuel in the guise of providing honest “heterodox” reflections on the fate of media in the platform era.

5.00–5.30pm

Break

5.30–6.30pm

Roundtable

So Just Where Is the Future of Criticism?

Catherine Liu (Palm Springs School for Social Research), Justin Smith-Ruiu (University of Paris), Anthony Galluzzo (Romanticon)

Chair and respondent: Shafquat Towheed and Edmund G. C. King (Open University)

6.30–6.45pm

Closing remarks