2a. Response to Gupta (in English)

Fernando Urueta

I would like to begin this brief response by highlighting the interest of Professor Gupta’s speech in describing a little-known situation in Latin America. The situation of Publishing Studies, its affinities with Literary Studies and the relation of both areas with the book market in the UK. It is little known, not only in the sense that this situation in Britain is unfamiliar for us, but in the sense that, in Latin America, Publishing Studies have not yet experienced the degree of development they have had in recent decades in the UK, a development which, as can be inferred from Gupta’s exposition, is related to the development of the British book market.

The text is also interesting because of the concern with respect to employment, a concern that is shared by administrators of Literary Studies departments, worried about the employment destinations of their graduate students, and students, worried about their own employment. However, the text is interesting, not because it solves these concerns, but because it can deepen them. Professor Gupta’s text focuses, among other things, on the question of whether grounding in Literary Studies does really open doors to the publishing enterprise and whether they enable people to make a living from it. However, the provisional response it provides could only be, at best, diffuse and discouraging. Diffuse, as Professor Gupta points out, because statistical indications are even more vague than usual in this regard; discouraging because, in any case, these vague information shows, on the one hand, that a Literary Studies degree does not offer a definitive advantage for finding employment in the publishing industry and, on the other hand, that general stability and growth of the sector are however not necessarily good news for employment prospects. Paradoxically, the publishing industry does not seem to be a good place to seek employment, precisely because of its own development.

One of the factors that explains this, as stressed by Professor Gupta, has to do with the technological changes in the sector. The gradual shift to digital publication, which is happening now, and the development of conditions for producing and distributing books, make the outlays in labour negligible compare to that of print publication. From this perspective, the text invites us to reflect on how programmes in Literary Studies will respond to these changes in the publishing industry. And just that question is the one I would like to put out to Professor Gupta. In your opinion, how should university-programmes respond to these changes in the book market? To the extent that the publishing field seems less and less promising for anyone seeking employment, should such programmes refer their graduate students to other labor markets, more promising than the book market? Or, by exploring their affinities with Publishing Studies, should Literary Studies offer, in addition to in-depth knowledge of such changes, practical training to allow them to perform successfully in this renovated industry?

However, what is most interesting in Professor Gupta’s exposition is, in my opinion, the fact that it leads to consider, besides the impact of Literary Studies in the book market, the problem of the ‘impact’ or penetration of the market in Literary Studies. The text invites us to reflect on this question in different ways, either by the technical terminology which it has to deal with, or by the necessary recourse to statistical data and policy documents. It is also present in the title itself, which refers to a specific relation between the university and the market, and up to the last paragraph, which raises the question of how Literary Studies will respond to the changes in the industry. (Indeed, even the fact that we are here discussing the impact of Literary Studies outside academia could be read as an invitation to consider also the problem of the ‘impact’ or the penetration of what is outside academia within Literary Studies. To put it in another way, our concern about the impact of Literary Studies on the market expresses, in itself, an ‘impact’ or an effect of the market on our own work.)

I would like to highlight one of the ways in which Professor Gupta´s speech invites us to think about this phenomenon. I am referring to the self-understanding of Literary Studies as suppliers of work-force for the industry, in this case the publishing industry, but we could also speak of other industries, such as the media, or academia itself. The text begins by stating that it seems natural to assume that university-programmes in Literary Studies should prepare students for a career in publishing. But the text offers many elements that leads us to think that this conception is not so natural, but a product of the more or less direct penetration of the market in academia. This self-understanding seems, at least in part, to be a consequence of the fact that university-programmes in Literary Studies are forced to compete with those devoted to Publishing Studies, both with respect to student recruitment and to the insertion of graduates in the labor market, while the development of Publishing Studies university-programmes seems, in turn, a more or less direct consequence of the development of the book market.

From this perspective, I would like to end this response by asking Professor Gupta how does he think that Literary Studies could deal with this self-understanding which, in fact, seems to come from outside academia? In fact, should they problematize this situation or, on the contrary, recognize themselves, without a problem, as suppliers of work-force and, as a consequence, transform themselves in order to satisfy the demands of the industry? Is it sensible to maintain both things, that is, to assume that Literary Studies, and academia in general, inevitably provide a work-force for society while at the same time calling into question the idea of Literary Studies, and academia in general, as work-force suppliers?