Critical Inquiry

07/26/2024

"On the level of something approaching a zero degree of plot, this requirement is ingeniously secured by the mechanism of the bomb, which is activated as soon as the bus goes over fifty miles an hour and programmed to detonate if it should slacken to something under that speed thereafter."

From our Summer 2003 issue, read Fredric Jameson's "The End of Temporality": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/377726

07/25/2024

"What strikes me as most original in the volume Tomáš Jirsa and Abraham Geil edited is precisely that, in adopting these multiple viewpoints, it contests the primacy of the art-historical narrative on the portrait and its traditional emphasis on the portrayed subject."

New in review, Alexandra Irimia reviews Reconfiguring the Portrait, ed. Abraham Geil and Tomáš Jirsa: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/alexandra_irimia_reviews_reconfiguring_the_portrait/

07/22/2024

"That they go together, these quick spirits and brilliant colors, should not be lost on us. Isidore of Seville, the savant’s savant, said in the seventh century AD that color and heat were the same since colors came from fire or sunlight and because the words for them were fundamentally the same: calor and color."

From our Autumn 2006 issue, read Michael Taussig's "What Color is the Sacred?": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/509745

07/19/2024

"It is Du Bois’s tradition of aesthetics, which takes seriously the unstable vessel of music in the context of racial capitalism, that Paul Rekret’s Take This Hammer corresponds to. Both works reject the idea that a particular vision of progress is inevitable, and instead embrace contingent emancipatory politics."

New in review, Glen Billesbach on Paul Rekret's Take This Hammer: Work, Song, Crisis: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/glen_billesbach_reviews_take_this_hammer/

07/15/2024

"To be clear, I did not take Gallagher to be arguing that fictionality was entirely invented in the eighteenth century. Her essay recognizes earlier forms of fictionality but writes them into the kind of developmental history often told through the terms romance and novel."

From our new issue, read Benedict S. Robinson's response to Catherine Gallagher: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/730344

07/11/2024

"She notes the epistemological conflicts between field theory and other sociological models that conceive of literature as an institution, a system, a world, a game, or a network, but her emphasis is on their points of methodological compatibility, or at least productive complementarity."

New in review, James F. English on Gisèle Sapiro's The Sociology of Literature: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/james_f_english_reviews_the_sociology_of_literature/

07/11/2024

"Unlike the seemingly rushed imagery we see on social media and in the news about these massacres, Ware’s images ask us to slow down, to remain in the fear and anxiety that his images produce. " Read Ryan Banfi's post on the CI blog.

Ryan Banfi Last spring marked the tenth anniversary of Patrick Jagoda and Hillary Chute’s special issue for Critical Inquiry, “Comics & Media,” which followed the May 2012 “Comics: Philosophy a…

07/08/2024

"By not reflecting on actual persons but instead inventing imaginary people, novelists made themselves the innocent opposites of the libelous scandalmongers who had seized the reading public’s attention earlier in the century. Their fictionalizing was thus ipso facto virtuous."

From our new issue, read Catherine Gallagher's response to Benedict S. Robinson's “The True Story of Fictionality”: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/730347

07/05/2024

"Benjamin’s provocation assumed special intensity when, while teaching The Book of the Dead in spring 2020, I found myself reading the line 'Respirators, not furnished' in the poem 'The Bill.' At a time when the US federal government was failing to deliver needed respirators to states whose medical supplies were being overwhelmed by need, this line flew off the page like a burnt wing of prophetic monstration."
From our new issue, read Rosalind C. Morris's "'Respirators, Not Furnished'": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/730352

07/01/2024

"While Chen’s allegorical writing is regarded as a symbol of anti-totalitarian resistance, Liu’s double-talk insinuates that the liberal demand to publicize the truth and weaponize philosophy with world-transforming aims is nothing short of tyrannical."

From our new issue, read Hang Tu's "Between Conformity and Dissent": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/730343

06/28/2024

"The CBC’s television documentary The Kingdom also uses tiny swirling lights to represent the activity of fungal spores, as do other nature documentaries including Fantastic Fungi. In each of these documentary cases, magnified fungal spores are illuminated by external sources of light, but the visual effect makes them appear to be themselves luminescent."

From our new issue, read Natalia Cecire and Samuel Solomon's "Mycoaesthetics": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/730345

06/24/2024

"The twentieth-century academic industry around the study of orality was interested in the mobile artifactuality—and ultimately in the permanence—that orality can produce through its patterns and formulas, not in the transience, the evanescence, the instability of the spoken medium that becomes perceptible in writing around 1600 or again around 1900."

From our new issue, read András Kiséry's "Speech, Media, and Early Modern English Writing": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/730349

06/21/2024

"Repeating Groundhog Day’s repetition, Russian Doll and all the others draw new affordances from the basic looping situation even as they inevitably call the original film to mind. In every case, the differences in genre and character amount in large part to strategies for deriving new ideas and new pleasures from the same situation."

From our new issue, read Marcie Frank, Kevin Pask, and Ned Schantz's "Situation: A Narrative Concept": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/730337

06/20/2024

"A question becomes posable: does the period commission a distinct mode of fiction? Primarily Big Fiction relays the prevalence of corporate allegory in successful novels; corporate house titles incorporate implicit significations of conglomerate publishing."

New in review, Anna Kornbluh on Dan Sinykin's Big Fiction: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/anna_kornbluh_reviews_big_fiction/

06/17/2024

"Manrique reveals in his Coplas that which human consciousness tries to avoid, that which it shuns in order to continue with its daily existence, and Debord uses elaborate historical paradoxes through the superimposition of images in a nonnarrative sense to an analogous revelatory effect."

From our new issue, read Noel Blanco Mourelle's "A Situationist in Autumn: Guy Debord, Translator of Jorge Manrique": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/730353

06/17/2024

"Free speech functions a bit like freedom in general; no one has it until we all have it." Read Adam Almqvist's "I Taught Israel/Palestine This Quarter - Right Now, There Is No Free Speech" on the CI blog.

Adam Almqvist This quarter, I taught my class, The Comparative Politics of the Middle East, which includes extensive discussions on Israel and Palestine. I came away with a bitter taste of the curr…

06/14/2024

"Ravaisson’s treatise thus allows us to explore a possibility overlooked in performative theories of gender and sexuality: that the rigidity of our desires, behaviors, and dispositions (whether temporary or enduring) is real rather than fictional, and that a propensity toward crystallization is immanent to desire itself."

From our new issue, read S. Pearl Brilmyer's "Q***r Rigidity: Habit and the Limits of the Performativity Thesis": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/730351

06/12/2024

"The administration is not actually listening to and engaging with student protests about its complicity in the genocide in Gaza." Read Kim Kolor's "The Chicago Tactics" on the CI blog.

Kim Kolor As people assembled the Dr. Hammam Alloh Medic Tent, the Refaat Alareer Library, and the beginnings of what would become a legendary twenty-four-hour food tent, administrators arrived and…

06/10/2024

"Okoyomon’s immersive installations unfold instead in dialogue with a growing plant known for its elision of human control—moreover, a plant whose dual character as soil remedy and ecological menace render it an ambiguous and disruptive presence.”

From our new issue, read Yota Batsaki's "The Plant at the End of the World: Precious Okoyomon’s Invasive Art": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/730350

06/06/2024

"Especially striking is her linking the possibilities of avant-garde writing with intricate grammatical reflections on operators like “as” in her essay on Leslie Scalapino. And there is an emotionally gripping concluding essay taking very seriously the Occupy movement that made me both nostalgic and even more depressed about our current political situation."

New in review, Charles Altieri on Lyn Hejinian's Allegorical Moments: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/charles_altieri_reviews_allegorical_moments/

06/04/2024

Summer is here! And so is our issue on kudzu, mushrooms, crystals, Guy Debord, situations, early modern English writing, conformity and dissent in China, fictionality, and Muriel Rukeyser. Check out our new issue at: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/past_issues/issue/summer_2024/

06/03/2024

"Below the delineating line of the bronze cap, the glass walls seem to merge in their transparency. People wander the glass passageways, giggling and taking selfies with their iPhones, sometimes bumping their heads on the glass walls when not paying attention. The participants animate the work by becoming performers in it. To enter the work is to become a part of it."

From Winter 2016, read Robert Morris's "The Aesthetic Passage": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/684356

06/03/2024

"In less than twenty-four hours, we were faced with the stark contrast between a punitive university culture of policing dissent and a popular university built on communities of care and . . . freedom for all." Read Hoda El Shakry's post on the CI blog.

Hoda El Shakry On 23 May, members of the UChicago Popular University for Gaza organized a graduation ceremony for students, faculty, staff, family, and community members. After the event, we all ga…

05/31/2024

"These reflections on the distinction between analogue and digital inevitably raise the thorny question of whether digitalization has compromised the authority of the photographic document. Those who argue the case are likely to underestimate the extent to which the analogue document is naturally distorted and intentionally manipulated."

From our Summer 2012 issue, read Margaret Iversen's "Analogue: On Zoe Leonard and Tacita Dean": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/667425

05/30/2024

"The Eye of the Master adeptly recontextualizes many of the abstractions that gave rise to AI—all while encouraging more granular study of the modes of labor exploitation that have evolved concomitantly with technological progress."

New in review, Marc Kohlbry on Mateo Pasquinelli's The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/marc_kohlbry_reviews_the_eye_of_the_master/

05/28/2024

"Our team was asked what the university administration could do to build trust with student protestors." Read Christopher Iacovetti's "Institutional Neutrality in a Time of Genocide" on the CI blog.

Christopher Iacovetti I want to begin these reflections with an episode I experienced as part of the UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP) negotiating team. Sitting across the table from President P…

05/24/2024

"Lázaro narrates his story in seven sections, or tractados, each organized around his service to a different master: the mendacious blind man, the parsimonious priest, the impoverished squire, the all-too-worldly friar, the double-dealing pardoner, and the artist."

From our Autumn 2015 issue, read Matthew Garrett's "Subterranean Gratification: Reading after the Picaro": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/682997

05/24/2024

"Many of us are asking ourselves about our relationship to the University of Chicago." Read Jessica H. Darrow's "First, We Faced White Nationalists; UCPD Was Worse" on the CI blog.

Jessica H. Darrow In the wake of the razing of the encampment on our quad, many of us are asking ourselves about our relationship to the University of Chicago and the university’s relationship to t…

05/23/2024

"In his generously capacious definition of making, every interaction with a book—no matter how passive it seems, as in the case of reading, or how material it might appear, as in the case of driving—generates a new object and a new self."

New in review, Leah Price on Adam Smyth's The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives:

05/23/2024

"'Loving Israel' is not and has never been the monopoly of Zionists and nationalists." Read Itamar Francez's "Freedom of Association" on the CI blog.

Itamar Francez In the days leading to the shutting down of the encampment, in discussions and debates among faculty, some colleagues expressed the view that the encampment should be shut down, offe…