Academic Criticism Research Articles

“It’s Not Scientific Enough”: Analyzing the Development of Academic Criticism in a Graduate Student Writer

Academic criticism is a fundamental feature of scholarly discourse. It plays a key role in scientific theory building, whereby ideas are iteratively challenged and redrafted (Kuhn, 1962, 1970). It is also how individual scholars create a research space (see the CARS model, Swales, 1990) and establish themselves as members of the research community. Thus, for graduate student writers, the ability to engage in this practice is important for academic success and socialization into the discourse community. However, by definition, students are novices, so they may struggle to assume the role of disciplinary authority required to evaluate others’ works (Dobson & Feak, 2001; Hyland, 2002). Several scholars have explored the linguistic and rhetorical features of academic criticism (Hyland, 2000, 2002; Thompson & Yiyun, 1991) and how it varies across disciplines (Hyland, 2000; Salager-Meyer & Ariza, 2003), often with educational goals in mind (Belcher, 1995; Swales & Feak, 2004). And while some researchers have analyzed criticism in student texts (Cheng, 2006), we know little about how this practice develops over time. Additionally, given that existing studies focus on written criticism, we have yet to explore the nature of spoken criticism and how it is shaped in and through interaction. Thus, this paper adopts a conversation analytic framework to examine how a graduate student writer formulates spoken academic critique during writing consultations and how these formulations change over time.

Editor's Introduction

Our third issue, Reverting the Gaze: Resisting Humanism and Hegemony in the West, combines art and academic critique to resist, revert, and refuse western humanism, covering issues from disability justice and state violence to neoliberalism and healthcare. At its core, western humanism is the mythical norm that many of us must live and die by – it is the systematic abjection, erasure, and exploitation of some forms of life in service of others; it is the pervasive idea that who “counts” are those in closest proximity to, and for the rare few, occupation of, all the imperial traits that states like Canada have rendered into conditions for life: whiteness, wealth, Christianness, ability, western-ness, masculinity, coloniality, cisness, heterosexuality, sanity, thinness; power.

Re-examining the Constitutional Court's Approach to the Property Question Since First National Bank of SA Ltd T/A Wesbank v Commissioner, South African Revenue Service; First National Bank of SA Ltd T/A Wesbank v Minister of Finance 2002 4 SA 768 (CC)

The First National Bank of SA Ltd t/a Wesbank v Commissioner, South African Revenue Service; First National Bank of SA Ltd t/a Wesbank v Minister of Finance 2002 4 SA 768 (CC) (FNB) decision led to the development of several questions that need to be answered when deciding whether there had been a deprivation of property for the purposes of section 25(1) of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 (the Constitution). The first question that needs to be asked when deciding whether there has been deprivation is whether that which was taken away from the property holder qualified as property for the purposes of section 25(1). It appears that the Court in post-FNB case law fails to decide the first question in a principled manner. In some cases the Court simply assumed that the interests at issue were property for the purposes of section 25 without a thorough investigation or clear guidelines regarding whether such interests were indeed property. Analysis of post-FNB case law also indicates that there are seemingly two approaches that may need to be followed to decide complicated categories of property interest. The Court has not made it clear which approach should be followed. In this article, I examine the Constitutional Court's approach to deciding what property is for section 25(1) purposes. The purpose is to determine how and to what extent the Court has decided what constitutes property for constitutional purposes. After an examination of the FNB decision and post-FNB case law, as well as analysing academic criticism, I suggest guidelines that the Court may follow to decide what constitutes property for section 25(1) purposes in future cases.

Re-examining the Constitutional Court's Approach to the Property Question Since First National Bank of SA Ltd T/A Wesbank v Commissioner, South African Revenue Service; First National Bank of SA Ltd T/A Wesbank v Minister of Finance 2002 4 SA 768 (CC)

The First National Bank of SA Ltd t/a Wesbank v Commissioner, South African Revenue Service; First National Bank of SA Ltd t/a Wesbank v Minister of Finance 2002 4 SA 768 (CC) (FNB) decision led to the development of several questions that need to be answered when deciding whether there had been a deprivation of property for the purposes of section 25(1) of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 (the Constitution). The first question that needs to be asked when deciding whether there has been deprivation is whether that which was taken away from the property holder qualified as property for the purposes of section 25(1). It appears that the Court in post-FNB case law fails to decide the first question in a principled manner. In some cases the Court simply assumed that the interests at issue were property for the purposes of section 25 without a thorough investigation or clear guidelines regarding whether such interests were indeed property. Analysis of post-FNB case law also indicates that there are seemingly two approaches that may need to be followed to decide complicated categories of property interest. The Court has not made it clear which approach should be followed. In this article, I examine the Constitutional Court's approach to deciding what property is for section 25(1) purposes. The purpose is to determine how and to what extent the Court has decided what constitutes property for constitutional purposes. After an examination of the FNB decision and post-FNB case law, as well as analysing academic criticism, I suggest guidelines that the Court may follow to decide what constitutes property for section 25(1) purposes in future cases.

Literary Modernism, Queer Temporality: Eddies in Time

Literary Modernism, Queer Temporality: Eddies in Time

What Is in a Name?

What Is in a Name? Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi (bio) KEYWORDS Mande, Bamana, Senufo, categories, identities, positionality Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, “secondly.” Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Danger of a Single Story,” 2009 In her much-watched and oft-cited 2009 TEDGlobal talk “The Danger of a Single Story,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie focuses on the power of storytelling, a power that scholars also hold through the telling and upholding of research narratives. As we think about the past, present, and future of an organization founded as the Mande Studies Association, or MANSA, Adichie’s comments bear consideration. The term Mande in the name Mande Studies Association asserts Mande-ness as central, and it places any other experience or understanding in a secondary position, even if the group’s membership demonstrates openness to other perspectives. MANSA membership and activities span a vast area within West Africa known for its longstanding cultural, linguistic, and social heterogeneity—a diversity that members may appreciate even as the organization’s name suggests otherwise. [End Page 175] In encouraging the group to reflect on the organization’s name and its implications, MANSA past president Joseph Hellweg and Mande Studies editor-in-chief Rosa de Jorio have opened an important discussion. Hellweg and de Jorio have kindly invited me to join others in contributing our perspectives to this reflection. I appreciate this opportunity to explain the research questions that first brought me to western Burkina Faso in 2004 for my dissertation research, my findings drawing from nearly two years of research in the region, and my experiences as a MANSA member since I participated in the organization’s 2008 conference in Lisbon, Portugal. While it is not my place to decide what the group’s name should be, I will demonstrate some of the ways in which the organization’s name promotes certain histories, commitments, and conveniences, orienting it in particular ways and rendering other positions secondary. I also recognize that no name can be entirely neutral, as any name will favor certain interests over others. The process of reflection itself seems critically important, as it encourages the group to think about, articulate, and decide which priorities are most pertinent to recognize at this particular moment. Study of Power Associations on the Senufo-Mande Cultural “Frontier” My motivation to study the arts of western Africa began with questions about categories and their implications for understanding which arose through my first experiences with African arts. I was an undergraduate student at the time, holding a work-study job supervised by Frederick John Lamp, who was then a curator of African arts at the Baltimore Museum of Art. A few years later, as a graduate student, I found myself increasingly puzzled by the apparent mismatch between the then-popular academic critiques of bounded cultural or ethnic groups as all-encompassing analytical frameworks tied to colonial conceptions and the simultaneous persistence of the frameworks in the actual labeling and presentation of the so-called historical or classical arts of Africa. I subsequently became aware of Burkinabe art historian Boureima T. Diamitani’s PhD dissertation on Senufo-speaking communities of western Burkina Faso that invest in and maintain chapters of the organization known as Komo and its arts.1 Diamitani’s dissertation intrigued me. It directed me to an area where I could explore the theory-versus-practice mismatch that confounded me and attempt to discern other bases for understanding. Diamitani’s attention to the presence of Komo in Senufo-speaking communities highlighted the fallacious idea that Komo operates as a Bamana or Mande institution.2 The view of Komo as specifically...

Reading Autofiction: The Cognitive Turn

Reading AutofictionThe Cognitive Turn Alison Gibbons (bio) Writing about autofiction in The Guardian, Rebecca Watson christens the 2010s, in the words of the article’s title, as the “decade we’ve become obsessed with reading—and writing—about ourselves” (2019). This obsession did not end at the stroke of midnight as the fireworks heralded 2020’s beginning. Rather, readers continue to experience what Jessica Winter, in her New York Times article of the same name, calls “our autofiction fixation” (2021): in other words, we enjoy reading autobiographical traces, even in works labeled as fiction. As these articles demonstrate, discussions of autofiction in the popular press frequently point out that readers have a literary appetite for autofiction. Yet despite this, academic criticism of autofiction has predominantly traced the historical development of the genre, debating the provenance of its name and considering its major themes. Only more recently are a select few scholars turning their attention to the innovative and important question of how readers experience and approach such works. To be clear, earlier research in autobiography and life writing was not uninterested in readers. In his highly influential essay “The Autobiographical Pact,” printed in English in On Autobiography (1987), Philippe Lejeune takes pains to state that his theorization of the differences between fiction and autobiography begins “from the position of the reader.” Thus, while Lejeune maps the stylistic properties that signal to a reader that they are entering into either an autobiographical or a fictional contract with a work’s author, he does so by considering the influence of textual features on a reader’s felt sense of a work’s fictional or nonfictional status. In this sense, for Lejeune, “the reader often tends to think of himself as a detective, that is to say, to look for breaches of contract (whatever the contract).” Likewise, in Touching the Void: Reference in Autobiography (1992), Paul John Eakin feels “no doubt that readers do read autobiographies differently from other kinds of texts, especially works they take to be ‘fictions.’” Without meaning to discredit the writings of Lejeune and Eakin (both of whose thinking I greatly admire and have found extremely influential), what differentiates them as the old guard [End Page 32] from an emerging vanguard of scholars interested in life writing’s readers is what we might speak of a nascent cognitive turn in the study of autofiction. In The Phenomenology of Autobiography (2017), Arnaud Schmitt draws on some cognitively informed research to offer philosophical reflections on autofictional and autobiographical reading experiences. Schmitt rebuffs claims that autofiction is a hybrid genre in which fiction and autobiography blend indistinguishably. Rather, he claims that autofictions have a dominant frame of interpretation—fiction—within which exist “visible ‘junctions’ with a remote reality, like a distant horizon with no real consequence for the readers’ interpretive frames.” In Schmitt’s view, when readers encounter a historical figure in fiction, such as a version of the real author, “source tagging” allows them to recognize that these characters have a basis in reality. However, “the more the historical person will linger in the fiction and interact with the fictional characters, the more she or he will be modified semantically.” Consequently, he argues that reading autofiction (and autobiography) as referential nonfiction requires “additional cognitive effort.” To capture this effort, Schmitt proposes the concept of “emersion”: this signals readers’ rejection of a total immersion in the narrative world by instead undertaking a “a form of resistance, a refusal to lose track of the reality beyond the text, as opposed to the reality of the text.” In contrast, in the chapter “A Cognitive Perspective on Autofictional Writing, Texts, and Reading” in the collection The Autofictional, edited by Alexandra Effe and Hannie Lawlor (2022), Effe and I do not restrict readers’ interpretations to a global frame of fiction. Instead, we take our cue from the many preceding theorizations of autofiction that discuss it as vacillating between fictionality and factuality and from studies in experimental psychology showing that readers treat fictional and nonfictional texts differently. Effe and I adopt the construct of “cognitive schemas” from cognitive science, which models the conceptual bundles we use to organize our knowledge and that can consequently influence expectations...

Nizar Qabbani's Poetry in Algerian Academic Criticism (Psychological Criticism as a Model)

This research current aims to shed light on the Algerian academic criticism (psychological criticism as a model) in its study of Nizar Qabbani’s poetry by which Nizar was known in his poetry, especially in political works. Therefore, the research focuses on highlighting irony as a psychological complex that constitutes the main axis of psychological criticism in Algerian academic studies, according to the researchers' observation of it.

Shallow Analysis of the New Generation’s Daily Narrative Criticism

Han Dong and Zhu Wen use the secularized daily life to build their text world, they go into secular life, focus on depicting the ordinary and trivial things,to pursue a kind of phenomenological text writing. The study of their daily writing used to be the focus of the academic attention and criticism. Combing comments on the new generation writers’ daily writing, some related theories and concepts involved can be reinterpret.

Cultural Studies and critical allyship in the settler colonial academe

ABSTRACT Successive generations of First Nation scholars have critiqued the ongoing institutional and disciplinary complicity of Higher Education to support settler colonialism. These critiques extend to include Cultural Studies, despite the field’s inter (anti)disciplinary efforts to expose power and inequality in social relations, dominant institutions, popular culture, and everyday life. As part of the university-machine, Cultural Studies is disconnected from the inherently pedagogical experiences and knowledge of Culture and Country for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. With an emphasis on praxis, we critique three autoethnographic examples of interactions between Indigenous agents and the settler colonial academe as a call to mobilize Cultural Studies literacies as a pedagogy of critical allyship to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scholars. Cultural Studies as critical allyship pedagogy supports non-Indigenous agents to conduct rigorous critique of internalized and institutional settler colonial hegemony, identifying absences and erasures of Indigenous agency, autonomy, and self-determination. These gaps and silences are not for allies – or Cultural Studies – to fill; rather the project is to leverage Cultural Studies methodologies to cede epistemological space in the academe to Indigenous ways of knowing and being without intervention, assimilation, or academic critique.

THE SINGULAR STATUTORY HOUSEBREAKING CRIME S v Slabb 2007 1 SACR 77 (C)

If the common-law crime of housebreaking with intent to commit a crime has been criticized for its form and function, the statutory variation of the housebreaking crime, housebreaking with intent to commit a crime to the prosecutor unknown, has been even more controversial, and has been subject to widespread academic criticism. The validity of this offence arose for discussion in S v Slabb (2007 1 SACR 77 (C)) (also briefly discussed by Hoctor “Recent Cases: Specific Crimes” 2007 SACJ 78 87).

Rehashed Liberalism, the Accusation of Radical Purity, and the Alibi of the “Personal”

Rehashed Liberalism, the Accusation of Radical Purity, and the Alibi of the “Personal”

Medice, cura te ipsum. W odpowiedzi Andrzejowi Zakrzewskiemu

Medice, cura te ipsum. A response to Andrzej Zakrzewski Andrzej Zakrzewski’s article reviews the book The judiciary adopted by the Treasury Commission of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in fiscal cases (1765–1794) by Piotr Miłosz Pilarczyk. The article was published in Krakowskie Studia z Historii Państwa i Prawa 14, issue 4 (2021). It is an unpleasant example of academic misconduct. Due to the doubts it raises, it is necessary to indicate the abuses committed by the reviewer. Among Zakrzewski’s numerous remarks, his charge of insufficient use of the literature available on the subject stands out. However, the majority of issues raised by the reviewer either do not relate to things found in the book, or the references found there are irrelevant. The next objection relates to the language used in the work. The reviewer’s arguments result from misunderstanding of the assumptions elucidated in the work. Polemics with the reviewer are in many cases impossible, because they often fail to justify criticisms with substantiable arguments, or they lack rational bases because of being ad personam. Criticism also applies to what is not in the book, because the reviewer does not focus on the content of the work, but refers to other topics that he would like to read about. Bearing all this in mind, one cannot consider Zakrzewski’s text be substantive and conforming to reasonable standards of academic criticism.

Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill

Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill

Remediations in an Emergency

Abstract This essay argues that configurations of what we have been calling “method” will not save the humanities from the compounding disasters of austerity, and that pretending this is not so makes for an especially airless kind of criticism. It tracks the insalubrious persistence of a critical grammar across the terrain of method polemicizing. “Method Wars,” it argues, have bequeathed to us nothing so much as an intricate machinery for metabolizing variance in approach as antagonism, the better to produce differing inflections of the fairly standard practice of “reading” as innovations of “method” that, through the rupturing force of their departures, might rescue the declining humanities. But the decimation of the humanities is, paradigmatically, a problem of structural disinvestment proper to the Long Downturn—a problem, that is, of political–economic conditions. Whatever their virtues or liabilities, our methods do not remake those conditions, though pretending that they might imparts a doomed glamour to our conceptual labors. Doing without that pretense, the essay contends, enables a larger purchase on the invigoratingly synthesizing critical projects that have flourished across the discipline—projects that are of more use to us in their fractious noncoincidence than their polemical overcoming. “Financialization” is Giovanni Arrighi’s term for what happens to capitalist systems in the long last moments of their lurch toward collapse. “Method wars,” a friend recently suggested, “are the financialization of academic literary criticism.”

THE INTIMIDATINGLY BROAD CRIME OF INTIMIDATION S v Cele 2008 JDR 0123 (N)

The criminalization of intimidatory conduct has been a feature of South African criminal law since the 19th century. Since the earliest forms of the offence, enacted by the pre-Union legislatures, the nature of the prohibition has gradually metamorphosised through successive legislative reformulations from being applied within a narrow labour-related context to a far wider sphere of application. The current formulation of the offence is to be found in section 1(1) of the Intimidation Act 72 of 1982 (hereinafter “the Act”).The “cosmic scope” of the offence has been the focal point of both academic and judicial criticism. The judgment in S v Cele (2008 JDR 0123 (N)) reflects noteworthy judicial reluctance to allow a conviction for intimidation, and provides an opportunity to deal (necessarily briefly) with some pertinent matters.

EFEKTIVITAS IMBAUAN KEMENDIKBUD UNTUK BELAJAR SECARA DARING DALAM RANGKA MENGHINDARI UNJUK RASA MENOLAK UU CIPTA KERJA

The ratification of the RUU Cipta Kerja by the DPR RI received protests from various groups, including student groups in Jakarta. Through rallies, students took various anarchic actions amid the threat of the Covid-19 pandemic with the aim of canceling the ratification of the RUU. In response to this, the Director General of Higher Education of the Ministry of Education and Culture issued a Circular on the Call for Online Learning and Socialization of the RUU Cipta Kerja, in order to increase the effectiveness of Distance Learning (PJJ), while at the same time avoiding demonstrations that ignore the safety and health of students. This study aims to analyze the effectiveness of the appeal letter on the responses made by universities and students. Through a descriptive qualitative method approach, the results of this study indicate that from several existing indicators, the Circular is less effective, because only one of the four targets has been achieved, namely the implementation of PJJ in the campus environment. Meanwhile, other indicators such as the prohibition of demonstrations, socialization of the RUU Cipta Kerja to students, and academic criticism were not achieved

Annette R. Federico. My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice.

Annette R. Federico. <i>My Victorian Novel: Critical Essays in the Personal Voice.</i>

Making sense of girls empowerment in Sierra Leone: a conversation

This Testify article features a conversation about the emancipatory potentials and pitfalls of girls empowerment as practiced, experienced, and judged by Sierra Leonean activists. We – two scholars and four activists – discussed views on and experiences of girls empowerment approaches that have been interpreted in critical scholarly literature as a form of neoliberal responsibilization. Also within this critical literature, there is often the notion that these approaches may yet create openings for emancipatory agency and counter-conduct. However, it remains unclear whether this happens and to what extent. Our conversation centres activists’ views on the academic critique of girls empowerment and raises a number of questions, including: Why do many feminist activists in Sierra Leone embrace girls empowerment approaches? What do they see in them? How do they interpret and practice them? Where do they see potentials and pitfalls? And what is the role of donors?

Affective text trajectories: Toward a linguistic anthropology of critique

In their studies of culture and society, many if not most scholars from the social sciences and humanities aspire to a critical approach. Recently, this practice of academic critique has become an object of study in its own right. Contributing to this “critique of critique,” I propose ideas for a linguistic anthropology of critique. I suggest mobilizing the concept of text trajectory from the toolbox of critical ethnographies of language and deploying it to investigate the trajectories of those critical texts that social and cultural sciences produce. It then becomes clear that critique is not merely a certain genre of text, but is, rather, a specific manner in which texts become embedded in affective dynamics in trajectories of recontextualizations-in-performance. To capture this complex process, I introduce the concept of affective text trajectory. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on the role of language and affect at International Criminal Court proceedings in northern Uganda, this article describes the affective text trajectory of one of the author's blog posts. The author suggests that in order to assess the critical potential of a text, one should investigate how it becomes embedded in affective dynamics throughout its trajectory.