“Where ‘Literature’ Comes From” by Edmond Caldwell:
In the larger literary venues (and on the more sycophantic lit-blogs) this phenomenon of corporate pre-determination of the “literary field” goes almost entirely unremarked. It amounts to “the repressed” of mainstream book-reviewing, as that which must remain unspoken in order for a certain type of utterance to exist at all. Reviews are written as if the titles swim into the reviewer’s ken on their own little spiritual wings or somehow magically materialize in the critic’s inbox; as if literature were somehow self-generating and “immediate” rather than constructed and subject to considerable mediation. There is in James Wood’s work not the least institutional self-consciousness or self-questioning, not a moment of institutional critique. “Literature” and “fiction,” when he speaks of them, are mystified categories.
For one antidote to corporate publishing, see Liberation Lit.
A Practical Policy 