World Building

A Review of Reasons and Feelings by Sarah Mesle (University of Chicago Press)

Sarah Mesle’s Reasons and Feelings: Writing for the Humanities Now is a new contribution to the University of Chicago Press’s Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing series, which contains some tremendous books on the subject. Though too numerous to list, the collection should certainly include Wendy Laura Belcher’s Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks. Mesle is a scholar and critic who has published extensively on American culture in both academic and nonacademic venues. That’s important, because language, style, and audience are all important throughlines in her book.

Reasons and Feelings is carved into two sections. The first, “Why,” is largely autobiographical, and sees Mesle reflecting on her personal journey as a writer, using that as a catalyst to think through different audiences of the varieties of writing she has engaged in and writing in and out of the humanities. The second half of the book, “How,” (the bulkier half, around 150 pages) engages more strictly as a book on writing practice, a guide to humanist writing, certainly for beginners, but with words worth ruminating on for all writers. The book is also somewhat of a requiem for an earlier academe, where cushy tenured positions were aplenty. The largest takeaway, though, is not grief, but resolution: academics should embrace both their intellectual instincts and their emotive ones too.

The viability of academic writing is a recurring topic in the humanities today; Mesle breathes fresh air into this sometimes-stale debate. The relatively narrow audience for most academic publications may be construed as alarming, especially in a time when even bestselling books are typically only celebrated when they reach tens of thousands of readers, an enormous downgrade from the reading publics of the previous century. To present a niche topic in an intellectually rigorous fashion is an acknowledgement that the readership too will be niche. But Mesle argues this is not a sound reason to dismiss academic writing, nor is the lackadaisical notion that academic writing is archaic or intentionally dense. Or, bad:

Academic writing gets a lot of grief for being “bad.” I don’t think it is. I think it’s good. But it can definitely feel bad to produce, sentence by sentence, a piece of writing that needs to not only describe its object but also defend your ideas and your intelligence, your financial security and the value of your expertise—in the largest sense, to make the case that humanities expertise itself is worth having. Here, too, we find a collision of scales. (53)

At once, Mesle makes the task sound harrowing, almost monumental, but also reinforces what is valuable and exciting about academic writing: the precision lends itself to deeper possibilities. But that “collision of scales” can be an inescapable material reality that academics must contend with. Academic writing’s readership often has an ouroboros problem: it’s a self-devouring audience. In discussing what she imagines her ideal reader to resemble, Mesle describes a reader who may well be an expert in the humanities but is “reading somewhere outsider her scholarship” (61). Reasons and Feelings certainly feels transcendent of academic/nonacademic genre boundaries—the language is not inaccessibly coded in academic jargon, nor is it demonstrably reliant on appealing to nonfiction language or tropes.

Mesle’s book (and certainly her own career as exemplar) demonstrates what it takes and what it means to be an academic humanist now: the thinning crossdisciplinarity, the disparate writing an academic does and what crossing genre boundaries look like. And that’s not even touching the discourse around audience, with which she brings excellent commentary on notions originally conceived by Michael Warner in his book Publics and Counterpublics from 2002, a book she describes as “a bit like reading some especially prescient speculative fiction” (64). Mesle expands on the idea of counterpublic by asking an urgent contemporary question: “What might this concept offer humanists writing now?” (66).

Indeed, some of the most interesting sections of the book are where Mesle historizes what it means to write as a humanist today, as in, what it has meant in the century so far. Mesle traces transformations in the publication landscape from the 2008 recession to the rise of public effacing places where writers began to publish and promote on the web (think WordPress and Facebook) and the slew of media websites that  Mesle calls “academically aslant publications” (55), where a generation of cultural critics cut their teeth—Jezebel, The Believer, The Awl, Stereogum—places a lot of us (including myself) grew up reading cultural criticism for the first time. She describes this moment as “the emergence of a particular public that was different […] than the one created by legacy publications. They didn’t aspire to general interest or the broadest possible reach. They were publications that, like us, had a sense of specialty” (54). It was the birth of something new, for literary journalism especially. And some of the writers that emerged from that era of blog-writing have subsequently become formidable in their literary efforts: Eula Biss, Danielle Dutton, Leslie Jamison, Sofia Samatar, Carl Wilson, and Kate Zambreno, among others.

The landscape has since changed. Mesle notes how many of these websites (The Toast, Gawker, The Awl, Bookslut, The Hairpin) had all shuttered by the time the NEH began handing out public scholarship grants in 2019. There is a sense that simultaneous to the current evolution occurring within the humanities at the academy, a similar change is underway within the indie media circuit. For better or worse, we now live in the era of Substack.

Mesle writes of the “mouth-hurting sadness” (241) in the decision to walk away from positions in her dissertated area, the nineteenth-century novel, to accept a position in the Writing Program at the University of Southern California. “Loss,” Mesle writes “at a baffling range of scales and felt textures, surrounds humanities study. I don’t mean to be dramatic about it. It’s just that in the upheavals of our situation, accurate description gets a little operatic. What I mean is that the past, for humanist writing, held experiences, structures, possibilities, securities, that the future won’t contain” (242). One can simply glimpse the current MLA Job List or Inside Higher Ed listings to see what she’s talking about. In a lot of ways, it’s absurd. Mesle is clearly a brilliant writer, and her dissertation on the manifestation of proslavery ideology in the sentimental novel in a just world should be forthcoming. On the other hand, her experiences in the teeth-gritting job market, and descriptions of the grief of that hardship feels invaluable, especially to a reader like me, two years away from hitting that same job market. Reality checks are not fun, but they are necessary.

Throughout the book, the thinkers Mesle is thinking with are enthusiastically of the current conducive moment, which feels like one of the things that sets the book apart from many such guides which might privilege a specific literary tradition of criticism and forgo present voices in the conversation of the humanities. Mesle does have anticipated necessary stalwarts of academic writing and cultural studies—Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson, Audre Lorde, to name a few—but the presence of the current voices who matter feels energized and thoughtful: these include contemporary thinkers such as Sara Ahmed, Sianne Ngai, Ryan Ruby, Anna Kornbluh, and Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon. Many of these scholars are the authors of articles that I am often discussing with my peers and often seeing on Twitter and Bluesky.

To that end, one of the best parts of the book is chapter six, “Who is Your Girl and Where is She Going?” which contemplates the specificity of diction, syntax, sources, and venue of the text. Mesle highlights the importance of shared vernacular, and uses a fun example of referencing Jessica Wakefield, a character from a 1980s YA series Sweet Valley High as a shibboleth for the shared cultural language her ideal reader might bring to the table. The firm insistence on a particular diction, a particular syntax and ideology, is essential to the idea of this book, and to an argument against hyperfixation on audience and public.

Near the beginning of the book, Mesle boldly declares: “For humanists, because writing is a key knowledge-making practice, and because writing style embeds modes and values of personhood, and finally because as humanists our task is to explore modes and values of personhood, we’re going to need multiple styles if we care, as we should, to explore multiple modes of being” (46). She follows up this declaration with an endnote, where she looks to critic Anna Kornbluh to continue the discussion on variants of criticism:

Here I’m making a claim for the capacity of criticism to avail itself of different styles in order to know the world differently, a claim that links criticism to art practice. My thinking developed partly by reading several essays about objectivity and fictionality by the critic Anna Kornbluh. For Kornbluh, objectivity enables critique, whereas interiority, identity, and “aboutness”—qualities criticism can take on that I, on the other hand, tend to value and enjoy—often disable it. I went to Kornbluh specifically to read a thoughtful, ethically invested account with which I expected to disagree. In many ways we do disagree. But I found Kornbluh’s discussion of how literary style can operate socially hugely clarifying. […] My own sense is that creative narration in criticism can work […] by pressing the reader to encounter the embedded epistemic values and norms of selfhood that often, in scholarship, go unexamined and unnaturalized. (258)

I love this aside; it is perhaps the definitive moment for me in this text. While the endnote diverges slightly from the subject matter of its page (Jonathan Kramnik’s Criticism and Truth and the modes of knowledge involved in teaching writing) the divergence is so fascinating and bold. Kornbluh’s Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism is a tremendous force in conversations on style and aesthetics now. This section defines Reasons and Feelings itself quite brilliantly: it’s a book working to avail itself of a different style of the “guide to writing” genre to attempt to know the world differently. It succeeds at that, in spades.

JON HOEL is a poet and critic from New England. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming with Black Lawrence Press, Denver Quarterly, Liverpool University Press, Massachusetts Review, Modern Philology, and Protean Magazine. He is a PhD candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.