In The Trouble with Literature, Victoria Kahn proposes a theory of poetics. Kahn begins by expressing dissatisfaction with the theoretical inheritance on which the academic study of literature is built. She faults formalist and deconstructive theorists such as Roman Jakobson and Paul de Man for reducing literariness to a system of figures and tropes and thus implausibly ignoring the real-world effects much literary writing palpably tries to achieve. Simultaneously she faults new historicists (Stephen Greenblatt) and Marxists (Jacques Rancière) for focusing so exclusively on social effects as to leave literary writing indistinguishable from any other type of discourse. Against those two well-worn paths, Kahn proposes to define literature as “our more general capacity to construct the world in which we live” (11). Literature consists, in other words, in the social construction of certain kinds of knowledge and meaning. It includes Hamlet and The Iliad, but also a wide range of other cultural artifacts and practices. Yet in Kahn's narrative these other forms of human making never eclipse literature in the traditional sense of culturally valuable writing. What sets Kahn apart from new historicist notions of cultural poetics is that she charts a distinctive tradition of thought centered on writers who were poetic also in the normal sense of the word—Homer, for example, or William Shakespeare. As Kahn points out, the word poetics—and thus the longest continuous tradition of literary theory—derives from the Greek word poiesis and thus designates both literature and human making as such.

Whereas Kahn's aims are thus theoretical, her method is historicist. Even as one can get the impression that she would gladly advocate for placing poiesis at the center of the discipline of literary studies, what she does in The Trouble with Literature is to show that various figures throughout history have conceived of novels, plays, essays, dramatic dialogues, and poems in such terms. She begins with classical thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, for whom poetics was a subcategory of rhetoric and thus an art of producing belief and opinions. In this classical way of thinking, Kahn highlights, the verisimilitude of a play or novel reflected fundamentally the same art as the persuasiveness of a lawyer's speech. In the book's middle chapters, she then focuses on key figures from early modern European and especially English literature—Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Thomas Hobbes, and John Milton—all of whom drew on classical ideas about rhetoric and poetics. In an intriguing final chapter she turns to Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, and J. M. Coetzee to suggest that this conception of poetics as making—and, especially, as making belief—is still alive, albeit it is insufficiently reflected in current literary theory. Read as a narrative, the book is an ambitious attempt to recover a notion of literature that is historically specific but also sufficiently transhistorical to span the Western tradition.

Kahn presents the above notion of literary poiesis as crystallizing especially in early modern Europe. The uniqueness of Renaissance literature is that its inheritance of classical poetics stands in tension with its other major influence: the Christian idea that belief or faith consists in an immutable truth given by God to humans who are more or less passive receptacles. In Kahn's narrative, the classical tradition ultimately wins out over the Christian one, thus tying her history of poiesis also to an intervention in early modern studies. Whereas scholars associated with that field's religious turn have argued that religious upheavals in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe disrupted traditional literary genres and thus spurred the artistic creativity of those centuries, Kahn contends that, vice versa, literature disrupted the zealous religiosity of that age. The tendency of early modern literary writers to see belief as a made thing undermined the certainty of philosophical and theological knowledge. Thus, whereas the English playwright Jonson claimed to use poetics to move audiences to believe in conservative notions of moral virtue, Kahn reads him—accurately, I think—as being more interested in moving them to believe that playwrights could make them believe things.

The implications of thinking about literature as a form of making belief extend beyond religion. In the second chapter, Kahn shows that Hobbes conceived of politics as a type of poetics: something made by people persuading each other to believe in a social contract too uncertain to be proven in a philosophical or scientific sense. She thus offers a compelling counterpoint to the argument, associated with Quentin Skinner among others, that Hobbes marked the end of everything that was good about Renaissance humanism. In Kahn's view, by contrast, Hobbes's political project was to apply the Renaissance and humanist notion of poetics to the realm of politics.

Throughout the book, however, the unreasonable certainty caused by a specifically religious type of fundamentalism is the most recognizable antagonist of poiesis and literariness. In chapter 3, Kahn examines Milton, a heterodox Puritan who understood religious truth to be at least partly made by the people interpreting it. In the fourth and final chapter, Kahn examines the legacy of such poetic thinking in modernity. Her longest example is Kierkegaard's self-avowedly subjective and non-universal understanding of faith. Kierkegaard's intellectual humility may seem anathema to Hobbes's grandiose hope to make people believe in Leviathan or Milton's notion that he could remake biblical truths by reinterpreting them, but the connection is this: knowing that belief is a made thing makes one less absolute in one's beliefs.

To appreciate the book's aims and scope, it is relevant to note that The Trouble with Literature grew out of the Clarendon Lectures Kahn held at Oxford University in 2017. Accordingly, Kahn's goal seems not to be a definitive history of poiesis in the Western tradition so much as a concise narrative that adds poiesis to the critical lexicon while highlighting its implications by reference to a few major writers and thinkers. There remains room for more case studies. Yet even in 120 relatively small-format pages, Kahn makes a provocative case for the language arts. A literary education engaging broadly with how beliefs are made stands to offer a genuine alternative to the certainty, self-satisfaction, and circular logic shared by political and religious fundamentalists.