We can now see the gap between DeWitt and formalism. DeWitt is not much concerned with art’s effect on the habituated consciousness of a hypothetical general reader, nor does she develop new artistic devices through which to render lost objects again visible. She is, in one sense, indifferent to the consciousness of her audience, though not in the way some critics celebrate as a hallmark of modernism. Likewise, she’s not obsessed with the internal relations of literary form and the autonomy of art (quite the opposite in fact, since she often speaks of art in instrumental terms). Instead, DeWitt focuses on the normative social standards and aesthetic horizons within which artists work and within which readers read. DeWitt is interested in what artists take for granted, what they assume they are and aren’t allowed to do or say, and the institutions that hem in what they can say. She asks the American novel of the late twentieth century to be more ambitious, to discard its Anglocentrism, and to widen its geographic and linguistic horizons. She asks something similar of the reader. After all, the ambitious writer of the future—who loves the “monosyllables and lack of grammatical inflection in Chinese,” “lovely long Finnish words all double letters & long vowels in 14 cases,” and “lovely Hungarian all prefixes suffixes”—will require a corresponding ambitious reader, one who might judge such a virtuosic textual performance. DeWitt’s vision of art is political to the degree that making the polyglot literary world she dreams of anything more than a quixotic fantasy would require a wholesale transformation of many existing norms and institutions.