Who Will Pay For the Literature of the Future?

I learned about this program, happening at the University of Chicago next month, from people criticizing it. Their concerns are valid, but they are not what I want to weigh in on here. My topic is the question posed in the title to #3: “Who Will Pay For the Literature of the Future?”

Who indeed? First, I wonder why the object of the question switches from criticism to literature in this question. So I’m wondering what the intention is: is to ask who will pay (or fund or publish) the novels and poetry that might later be deemed ‘literature’?¹ Or does it mean literature more broadly, including, say, the criticism that is the object of the first two panels, and the program itself? Either answer, it appears to me, seems to depart from the other key topic of this program, the university.

To tease this out, I first asked myself, “who published the literature, as in Great Works Of Literary Merit, of the past? Tough question! Hard to answer! But no matter what you include (Thomas Wyatt’s cote…