The Ends of Literary Studies

Bringing together an exciting group of knowledge workers, scholars and activists from
across fields, this book revisits a foundational question of the Enlightenment: what is
“the last or furthest end of knowledge”? It is a book about why we do what we do, and
how we might know when we are done.

In the reorganization of knowledge that characterized the Enlightenment, disciplines
were conceived as having particular “ends,” both in terms of purposes and end-points.
As we experience an ongoing shift to the knowledge economy of the Information Age,
this collection asks whether we still conceptualize knowledge in this way. Does an
individual discipline have both an inherent purpose and a natural endpoint? What do
an experiment on a fruit fly, a reading of a poem, and the writing of a line of code have
in common?

Focusing on areas as diverse as AI; biology; Black studies; literary studies; physics;
political activism; and the concept of disciplinarity itself, contributors uncover a life
after disciplinarity for subjects that face immediate threats to the structure if not the
substance of their contributions. These essays – whether reflective, historical, eulogistic,
or polemical – chart a vital and necessary course towards the reorganization of
knowledge production as a whole.