English makes a similar point in his brilliant book on cultural prizes - both literary and nonliterary - The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Value. that most of its energy has been invested in extending outward from the nation rather than inward to the regions and localities, not to mention the institutions, that are equally corrective to the thoughtless assumption of disciplinary nationalism." McGurl concludes (rightly, I think) that there is no one right scale of literary study, and that a focus on the subnational - for example, on the institution - is as valid an area of critical focus as a focus on the transnational, cosmopolitan, diasporic, and global. "t is characteristic of the cognitive expansionism of literary studies.
Bigger, we commonly assume, is better, and will garner for us more funding, more attention, more significance. Mark McGurl's The Program Era ends with an insightful reflection on the problem of "scale" in literary study - our almost automatic assumption that we must always scale up the stakes of literary study in order to argue for our relevance.
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