Contemporary Critical Practice Research Articles

Maternal Sepsis.

Sepsis is the second leading cause of pregnancy-related mortality in the United States. Early recognition, treatment, and escalation of care for the obstetric patient affected by sepsis mitigate the risk of mortality and improve patient outcomes. In this article, we provide an overview of maternal sepsis and address topics of maternal pathophysiology, early warning signs, diagnostic criteria, early goal-directed therapy, and contemporary critical care practices. We also present an overview of common etiologies of maternal sepsis and suggested treatment approaches.

Maryam Athari. Review of "Alternative Iran: Contemporary Art and Critical Spatial Practice" by Pamela Karimi.

Maryam Athari. Review of "Alternative Iran: Contemporary Art and Critical Spatial Practice" by Pamela Karimi.

Η συμβολή της ΚΑΛ, της διαλογικότητας και της πολυφωνίας στην αντίληψη του τρόπου κατασκευής ταυτοτήτων Σημεία συνάντησης ανάμεσα στον Κριτικό Γραμματισμό και την Έρευνα Δράση.

Action Research and contemporary critical literacy practices have many implications, not only theoretical such as the epistemology of experience, the reflection, the need for social change, but also methodological such as the use of critical (speech) events and Critical Discourse Analysis ( Σιπητάνος , 2020). In this two year project, where critical literacies were researched alongside with action-research, the connections between CDA and dialogicality were discussed through empirical data. Through these complex practices the students realized their discourse contradictions and the importance of dialogicality and polyphony as important elements in their formation from active students to active citizens through the co-analysis of data they produced as co-researchers.

The “Nature” of American Literature: Race, Place, and Textuality in John Crowe Ransom and Elizabeth Madox Roberts

“The ‘Nature’ of American Literature” explores how John Crowe Ransom and his less-studied contemporary Elizabeth Madox Roberts advanced a theory of literary objects that emerged from nature itself. This theory formed the basis of Ransom’s bid, in “Criticism, Inc.,” for disciplinary stratification and productivity. Through a set of representational practices this article gathers under the terms “natural reading” and “natural writing,” Roberts and Ransom framed valuable aesthetic objects as the product of a carefully cultivated relationship between human observers and landscape. For both, however, this rarified relationship was grounded in and served to reinforce racial hierarchy. Even as the discipline turns away from the cultural elitism associated with New Criticism, Ransom’s understanding of the literary object as natural and thus subject to disciplinary study continues to inform contemporary critical practice. This article thus invites engagement with the often submerged racial politics of the ways we constitute objects and processes of disciplinary literary studies.

Situating Critical Practice in China Today

In this interview, Wang Xiaoming, an important participant in crucial critical debates since the 1990s, discusses his views on humanism, contemporary critical practice, social activism, the Chinese revolutionary tradition, the role of intellectuals in advocacy for social change, urbanization and its discontents, and the work of Chinese cultural studies.

American Literature and the New Puritan Studies ed. by Bryce Traister

Reviewed by: American Literature and the New Puritan Studies ed. by Bryce Traister Richard A. Bailey (bio) American Literature and the New Puritan Studies Edited by bryce traister Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017 254 pp. When thoughts turn to Puritans in America, they often still go one of two ways. In the popular imagination, they tend to be either a starting point for the view of America as the shining beacon for all the world to see and imitate or the stoic, repressive persecutors of all things even slightly different. Thankfully, recent scholarship, such as that by David Hall and Michael Winship, has demonstrated many of the shortcomings of both of [End Page 824] these extreme ways of imagining America's Puritans. By reevaluating the "Puritan origins thesis" and its tendency toward a narrative of national exceptionalism in light of new directions in current scholarship, the essays in American Literature and the New Puritan Studies map some of the exciting, potential routes forward for those interested in studying Puritans and their influences in American history, letters, and thought. In her To Live upon Hope: Mohicans and Missionaries in the Eighteenth-Century Northeast, Rachel Wheeler posited the need "to make the Puritans strange once again" (4). Such a task seems to be one of the aims of this collection of essays. In his introduction, "The New Puritan Studies," Bryce Traister contends that this volume and the scholarship it represents "will enable and enrich rather than diminish and confine the study of American literature and culture," making "the case for considering the scholarship of the New Puritan Studies as a useful provocation to contemporary Americanist critical practice" (3). Traister's introduction to the collection is very useful not only for the way it establishes the direction of this specific volume but also for the succinct way that he sets the current stage of Puritan studies. His brief survey of the field from Perry Miller through Janice Knight and Stephen Foster to Sarah Rivett and others clearly demonstrates the continued need for the sorts of scholarship represented by these twelve essays. The collection is divided into three parts: "Unexpected Puritans," "Puritanism's Others," and "Puritan Afterlives." Describing these parts as "broad and provisional," Traister explains the direction and scope of each part as "[part 1] a commitment to understudied or too-long buried intellectual and historical archeologies; [part 2] an engagement with social and political categories of critique, including the indigenous encounter; and, finally [part 3], an interest in the 'post-Puritan' careers of some of the key concepts we associate with the Puritan seventeenth century" (15). Within this structure, several of the essays in each part stand out as particularly provocative and useful toward such a rethinking and reframing. Part 1 offers several fascinating essays, including one by Michael Schuldiner that tackles some of the myths about Puritans and their lack of mirth by focusing on a pamphlet written by Boston pastor Benjamin Colman. Not only does his analysis dispel some received ideas about Puritans, but Schuldiner also situates Colman, and by extension New England Puritanism, within the world of the Enlightenment and modernity. Another essay [End Page 825] in the first part of the collection that bears some attention is Linda M. Johnson's insightful analysis of John van der Spriett's portrait of Increase Mather. In "A Pre-millenial Portrait during the Revocation of the Massachusetts Charter," Johnson examines this painting to demonstrate fairly convincingly that divines such as Increase Mather expressed a concern to self-fashion and self-promote in ways that on the surface might seem paradoxical with accepted ideas about "Puritan self-effacement" (70). Her close reading of such a material archive demonstrates at least one way forward in evaluating and reevaluating the place of American Puritans. Part 2 focuses especially on "Others" within the bounds of Puritanism. The "Others" in question here include those groups and individuals perhaps outside the traditional pale of Puritanism, such as Native Americans and women. Rather unexpectedly, though, Jason M. Payton's "Piracy, Piety, and Providence in Cotton Mather's The Vial Poured Out upon the Sea" includes pirates as one of these outside groups, albeit in different ways. Analyzing one...

Is It Better to Give or to Receive?

Is It Better to Give or to Receive?

Counter-Critical Theory: An Intervention in Contemporary Critical Thought and Practice

Abstract Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht's short-lived project for a critical theory journal, Krise und Kritik, foundered in 1931 on the shoals of positivism. Since then, a series of anti-foundational challenges to traditional critical theory has fragmented the landscape of critical theory and, especially, critical praxis, leaving us disarmed today, in these unprecedented times. This essay offers a way forward by means of what it calls “counter-critical theory”: a critical method that indexes the original impulse of critical theory, but liberates it from its foundation in order to allow for a more open-ended and permanent re-examination of how power circulates and recirculates throughout society. Counter-critical theory is a pure theory of illusions and calls for a strategic, ecumenical practice of political disobedience, accompanied by an unrelenting and resolute deployment of interpretation and resignification.

What's in this Issue

What's in this Issue

The Continuing Problem of the Universal to Questions of Justice: A Feminist Reading of Lars von Trier’s Dogville

What are the terms of evaluation that seem relevant in deciding whether a film is feminist or anti-feminist? Which critical practices should be engaged in such an evaluation? In recent and contemporary critical feminist practices, feminist arguments are no longer based on a stable subject category of “woman” and there is no longer any particular methodology upon which feminist theorists rely. The category of “woman” has been revealed to be not an ahistorical, stable category but an effect of material and representational practices. Further, feminist methodologies have been concerned to contextualize the framing of the questions they ask, as well as their place in the methodologies they employ. In addition to the refusal of an essentialized female subject, feminists have called into question the idea that it is possible to produce a “feminist method” based on the standpoint of a female subjectivity, even where this subjectivity is admitted as a construct, arguing that this extrapolation to the general from a particular point of view produces political, and frequently racist, effects. In this essay, I consider Lars von Trier’s controversial film Dogville (2003) as a case study to explore the relation of practices of representation to questions of feminist justice. I argue that the film does a lot of good critical work in showing the ways in which certain practices of representation can be mobilized to produce a collectivity (or “sovereignty”) that is seen to emanate from “the people” and to thereby instantiate authority, while simultaneously disguising the material and political effects of its subjugation of “others.” However, in doing this work the film produces its own problematic construction of universality and particularity. Further, the film instrumentalises representations of sexual violence and subjection in order to prove its point, and as productive as these tactics are to illuminating questions of social justice, I argue that this representational practice produces effects that need to be read as anti-feminist.

The Formalist Genesis of “Postcolonial” Reading: Brathwaite, Bhabha, and A House for Mr Biswas

The Formalist Genesis of “Postcolonial” Reading: Brathwaite, Bhabha, and A House for Mr Biswas William Ghosh The novel was an imported form. For the metropolitan writer it was only one aspect of self-knowledge. About it was a mass of other learning, other imaginative forms, other disciplines. For me, in the beginning, it was my all. —V. S. Naipaul1 “Form,” we are told, is an abstraction, a “mischievous” concept.2 Formalism—the practice of reading and critical discourse that “form” spawns—registers as much a “desire for form” as an identification or analysis thereof.3 It says as much about the investments (or fetishes) of the reader as about the text in which she locates formal work, or beauty, or accomplishment. To the literary historian, “form” becomes operative at moments when the discourse of formalism feeds into the self-understanding, and eventually the practice, of writers themselves. One such moment—in this case, a rather extended one—encompassed those mid- to late-twentieth-century writers and critics born into restive British colonies, or during the first years of independence. For many writers of the decolonizing world, and for the theorists of postcolonialism who followed them, “form” took on historical and spatial concreteness. It is often now posited that “formalism” might be applied to these colonial, anti- or postcolonial texts, but it is not generally suggested that questions of form and formalism helped define the emergence of postcolonialism itself as a mode of critique. I contend, in what follows, that they did. This essay describes three sites of reading. These sites exemplify reading habits that were paradigmatic of historical moments within Britain and its (former) colonies: first, that of pre-war colonialism; second that of the nationalist anti-colonial moment on the cusp of constitutional independence; and third, the later twentieth-century moment in which academic engagement with colonialism [End Page 765] crystallized—in Britain—into postcolonial theory. The first, a fictional example, sees Naipaul’s Mr Biswas, an underemployed sign painter in colonial Trinidad, reading British magazines “for the letters” before going on to read them for the “stories.”4 The second sees Edward Kamau Brathwaite, a year after Trinidadian independence and the breakdown of the West Indian Federation, present A House for Mr Biswas in the Caribbean periodical Bim as doing exemplary formal work: modeling on the level of form the exigency of participation in emerging national communities. The third sees Homi K. Bhabha in Thatcherite England in the 1980s—the “heyday of high theory and low spirits”—return to the same novel to articulate what he would later call “the postcolonial perspective.”5 The function of “form” in each case becomes a point of contention for these readers; to read—in these examples—is to contend with form. Rather than viewing these sites of reading as discrete instances—colonial, anti-colonial, postcolonial—these debates about form constitute a thread which allows us to view them comparatively, as a genealogy. Bhabha and Naipaul have seen their stock fall over recent years, while the term postcolonial that links them commands an increasingly slim constituency. Edward W. Said’s strident attacks on Naipaul in the late 1980s—in which he described him as a strategic, non-white mouthpiece of Western neo-imperialism—have never been refuted.6 And Bhabha’s critical method of intricate poststructural close-reading has been seen as politically ambivalent perhaps not least because his muse Naipaul’s politics are so obviously and irredeemably bad. This essay takes no programmatic position regarding the value of the work of Naipaul or Bhabha (or that of Brathwaite) in contemporary critical or pedagogic practice; rather, it views the prominence of these authors in particular periods as facts of literary history. Even if less widely read or cited than formerly, these writers were nonetheless foundational figures in strands of colonial, anti-, and postcolonial thought concerned with the concept of the literary and its formal manifestations. The strands of anti- and postcolonial thought for which the names Brathwaite and Bhabha (respectively) became bywords are misunderstood if not seen in terms of the literary corpus on which they draw, in which Naipaul enjoyed great prominence. The ideological contrasts between the Eurocentric assimilationist Naipaul...

Détourning the Chimera: Toward a Global Critical Practice

Détourning the Chimera:Toward a Global Critical Practice Christopher Leigh Connery (bio) The variants of neoliberalism east and west of the Pacific—China’s “state neoliberalism” and the more epistemologically totalitarian version that has long been ascendant in the United States1—while providing cyclical alterations of anachronistic stick waving with the kind of symbiotic chumminess on display during Xi Jinping’s visit to Davos, do not portend any serious systemic fissures at the commanding heights of the global economy. The latest indications (June 2017) suggest that Donald Trump is, as many of us always thought he eventually would, falling into line. There is considerably more work to be done, however, in the ranks of the opposition. For US-based scholars and critics, an anticapitalist intellectual project that seeks to be global in its scope and orientation requires articulation with comrades in China.2 This is not because China is emerging as the new frontier of capital accumulation, coming to the rescue of a global system that may be nearing its structural limits in Europe, Japan, and the United States—a speculative proposition at best—but out of what must be a collective concern with our common humanity, in which, demographically speaking, China looms large. I take among the aims of this special issue to include a contribution to this project, as well as a contribution to a more properly global critical culture, and it is in that spirit that I offer some perspectives on the institutional and ideological character of contemporary Chinese critical practice. As is the case elsewhere in the world, the overwhelming majority of critical China-based intellectuals work in universities. Higher education in China has been the site of massive expansion since the beginning of the reform period (1978), and there are currently over twenty-five hundred institutions of higher education enrolling over thirty million students. The numbers continue to grow. Placing a high priority on institutional ranking, central government initiatives for higher education have included the multibillion-dollar-funded 211 project—devoted to the strengthening of about one hundred of the top-ranked universities in China—and the 985 project, aimed at strengthening the international rankings, global reputation, and global impact of thirty-nine of [End Page 541] China’s top universities, and the latest iteration of the campaign, the recently announced “double first class” (shuang yiliu) program, prioritizing the creation of more universities and disciplines in the higher echelons of the global rankings. Although the “double first class” program aims to spread resources more broadly, to date most resources have been channeled to an elite tier of universities, as is the case elsewhere in the overdeveloped world, and this has correlated highly with the creation and reproduction of a socioeconomic elite, whose members are the initiatives’ primary beneficiaries.3 For university academics, however, particularly those outside the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields, conditions are grim. Chinese academics are, in PPP (purchase power parity) terms, among the worst-paid academics in the world, with an average monthly salary of $720 and starting salaries averaging $259, at the bottom of world rankings.4 Universities are administered in a top-down manner, and administrators, even those with doctorates, are drawn largely from an administrative track. There is no tradition of faculty self-governance, and academics’ choices of courses to teach, dissertation, research, and grant topics are commonly not wholly their own. Advancement up the ranks is dependent on quantitative evaluation that makes the UK and US systems look benign. Normally, promotion depends on publication in one of the over five hundred publications listed in the “key publication list” (hexin kanwu), successful application for nationally sponsored research grants (on topics or in areas specified by the state), study or research abroad, and examinations, and all hires and promotions must be reviewed at the provincial Ministry of Education. The “key publications” do not include many of those critical analytical journals that have the most intellectual impact in the humanities and analytical social sciences such as Tianya, Nanfang chuang, or Refeng xueshu, and it is very difficult to add publications to the list. Often, academics have to pay to publish in the key publications. I could find...

The Alterpodium: A Performative Design and Disability Intervention

The Alterpodium is a custom-made, portable disability object that I use to “perform disability” during international and national conferences, symposiums, and lectures. As a person with a rare form of dwarfism called brachyolmia, podiums, like other architectures of this ableist world, are often inaccessible to my 4’3” stature. Thus, Alterpodium critiques objects within the built environment that have only one body type and size in mind. While most architectural accommodations for atypical bodies are created for seamless, even invisible integration, the Alterpodium amplifies its structural workings, elongating and emphasizing the user’s opportunity to create an alternate, provisional world in public. The Alterpodium thus attempts to claim spatial agency over a public environment that commonly serves ostensibly normative bodies. Through the performance of this custom-made object, where boilerplate design is reimagined and rebuilt, I also offer audience members the opportunity to rethink the ways their own bodies engage with objects in public space. The space of disability animated through Alterpodium is one that sets an important new agenda within contemporary art, architecture, and critical design practices.

Nothing wasted: engaging values and the imagination. How can working with feminist speculative fictions enthuse and engage students with social justice and sustainability in an age of austerity?

In the context of contemporary higher education, post white paper, ‘Students at the heart of the system’ [BIS, 2011. Students at the heart of the system [online]. Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/31384/11-944-higher-education-students-at-heart-of-system.pdf, (Accessed 5 Feb 2014), in which funding and commodification of learning and of students dominate university mission statements and agendas, it is crucial that we collaborate with our students to engage imagination and critical faculties with issues of value, and of social justice. Teaching and researching contemporary feminist speculative fictions and feminist critical practice offer a priceless opportunity to make a difference, to challenge the intellectual impoverishment that this new austerity brings with it. Learning and teaching research into threshold concepts and signature pedagogies combine here with feminist critical practice in a discussion of teaching two speculative fictions which engage criticality and values: Atwood [Atwood, 2003. Oryx and Crake. New York: Nan A. Talese.) and Hopkinson [Hopkinson, 1996. A habit of waste. Skin folk. New York: Aspect, 183–202] each of which critiques flawed societies using tropes of waste, and rejection of difference. Each suggests recovery from damage done in the name of austerity, and imagines futures for the critical imagination, social justice, self-worth and agency.

Who Calls the Tune: Literary Criticism, Theatrocracy, and the Performance of Philosophy in Plato’s Laws

This article offers a study of literary criticism in Plato’s Laws . According to standard accounts of the history of literary criticism, fourth-century philosophers represent a break from archaic and democratic notions of poetic judgment. The interpretation presented here suggests that the Laws synthesizes archaic and contemporary critical practices. In doing so, it fashions literary criticism as a performance of philosophy, combining claims to social and political authority with the evaluation of texts according to independent, objective criteria. The Laws thereby offers a hybrid model of contemporary critical practices to extend the ideal city’s political and moral philosophy into contexts of performance.

Sovereignty of the Dead: Authors, Editors, and the Aesthetic Text

Forty-four years ago a box carried within it a message concerning death of author. It also carried within it other works which demonstrate what art after looks like. One would have hoped that by this time death of would have become part of modus operandi of arts of present. Such though does not appear to be case. Not only are some critics, like Jane Gallop and Sean Burke, challenging notion that was ever dead--even for those who coined familiar poststructuralist slogan (Gallop 1) (1)--but contemporary critical, textual, and editorial practices seem more attuned to asserting aesthetic sovereignty of dead than allowing or writing to speak on their own behalf. For me, critical and editorial acts that allow author to impede free circulation of texts and determine textual practices bind us to an aesthetic and critical past we allegedly were supposed to have overcome. Editors and critics today need to strive for textual practices that move beyond reliance on authors and authorship--and instead learn to revel in collaborative textual multitude afforded us by age of digital multimedia. A resurrection of is simply not acceptable--even if age of high theory which announced death of is also itself dead. (2) Let's take opportunity now to turn back to message in box--and work our way forward from it to critical and editorial present. DEATH IN A BOX box which delivered message of death of was multimedia Aspen, founded in early 1960s by Phyllis Johnson, an editor at magazines such as Women's Wear Daily and Advertising Age (Aspen Magazine). Described as the first three-dimensional magazine, issue came in a customized box or folder filled with materials in a variety of formats (Wikipedia entry), including booklets, posters, postcards, flipbooks, vinyl recordings, and in one issue, a reel containing four Super-8 films (Aspen Magazine). Johnson, who said that should be a time capsule of a certain period, point of view, or person, and had different designers and editors for each of its ten issues, published first issue in winter of 1965--and its last issue in 1971 (Aspen Magazine). While first two issues contained materials related to ski resort town from which magazine took its name, third issue, edited by Andy Warhol and David Dalton, left town behind and took up instead pop art. Warhol and Dalton's issue included, among other items, a vinyl recording of guitar feedback by John Cale of Velvet Underground--and excerpts from fourteen papers presented at Berkeley Conference on LSD. (3) It is within context of LSD papers and John Cale feedback that this multimedia magazine released in Issue 5/6 a provocation by Roland Barthes entitled The of Author. (4) Though Barthes's article would also appear following year in French in Manteia, a bound magazine also in its fifth issue, it is wonderfully appropriate that a piece which figuratively unbinds from text and criticism would first appear in a literally unbound magazine--one which Johnson wanted to get away from bound magazine format, which is really quite restrictive (Aspen Magazine). Edited by Brian O'Doherty, with art direction by David Dalton and Lynn Letterman, Aspen 5/6 was published Fall-Winter 1967 by Roaring Fork Press, NYC. In addition to Barthes's Death of Author (translated from French by Richard Howard), two other essays were included in box (George Kubler's Style and Representation in Historical Time and Susan Sontag's The Aesthetics of Silence). In addition, among vinyl recordings found in box were Samuel Beckett's Text for Nothing #8 (1958) read by Jack MacGowan, Excerpts from Nova Express (1964) read by their author, William Burroughs, and an excerpt from Alain Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, Now shadow of southwest column . …

Life Writing as Critical Creative Practice

This essay offers an overview of the development of life writing criticism from its status as an outsider of English studies to a flourishing interdisciplinary field. I argue that one of the characteristics of this history has been a schism between critics of life writing and life writers themselves, a schism that echoes the well known ambivalence literary critics and writers generally feel towards each other. However over the last two decades, critics and life writers have become far more curious about each other and indeed increasingly borrow each others tools. Contemporary critical practice has become self-reflective, and a sizeable minority of academics have even penned their own memoirs. Conversely, life writing practitioners are more engaged with the theoretical debates that surround creative practice.I situate this picture of mutual influence in relationship to institutional as well as intellectual and creative developments in the UK, though with some references to the US. And I consider the dark side to the discovery of the academic I and the creatives inner intellectual. However I conclude that we are in an exciting moment for life writing, a mutable genre that can be at once critical practice, practice-based research and creative experiment.

Introduction: Life Writing and Critical Practice

Contemporary critical practice is becoming increasingly self-reflective, with first person commentary and subjective musings appearing in academic texts produced across disciplines. On the other hand, as the number of writing practitioners in the academy mounts, their works reflect a growing awareness of, and engagement with, the critical and theoretical debates that surround creative practice. Nowhere is this interchange between theory and practice more prevalent, however, than in the discipline of life writing, a field concerned with the forces at work on the borderland between the self or subject and the performance of that self in communicable form. Yet the two groups, life writing critics and life writing creatives, often remain mutually suspicious and their relationship under-theorised. This Special Cluster of Literature Compass brings together scholarly readings, both critical and creative in form, which interrogate the place of life writing in critical practice. These essays were developed through discussions and debates at the 7th Biennial International Auto/Biographical Association Conference at University of Sussex in June 2010. IABA has led the professionalization of life writing as a field of literary critical debate and is increasingly being used as a forum for life writers as well. In this Special Cluster, leading figures in the field, both critics and practitioners, begin a dialogue on the developing phenomenon of creative/critical interface in life writing, and make suggestions for new pathways for the future.

The Proverbial “Lesbian”: Queering Etymology in Contemporary Critical Practice

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Proverbial “Lesbian”: Queering Etymology in Contemporary Critical PracticePaula BlankPaula BlankCollege of William & Mary Search for more articles by this author College of William & MaryPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 109, Number 1August 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/661977 Views: 360Total views on this site Citations: 9Citations are reported from Crossref © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jessica Campbell Can we call Anne Lister a lesbian?, Journal of Lesbian Studies 9 (Sep 2022): 1–13.https://doi.org/10.1080/10894160.2022.2101985Stephen Turton Redefining realness, Journal of Language and Sexuality 9, no.22 (Sep 2020): 101–126.https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.19012.turCaroline Derry Introduction, (Jan 2020): 1–39.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35300-1_1Zohar Weiman‐Kelman Eroto‐philology: Sex, language, and Yiddish history, Orbis Litterarum 74, no.11 (Sep 2018): 58–69.https://doi.org/10.1111/oli.12203Sean Alexander Gurd David Melnick’s Men in Aïda, Classical Receptions Journal 8, no.33 (Aug 2015): 295–314.https://doi.org/10.1093/crj/clv007Carla Freccero The Queer Time of Lesbian Literature: History and Temporality, (Dec 2015): 19–31.https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781107284333.003Sarah Kay Post-human philology and the ends of time in medieval bestiaries, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 5, no.44 (Dec 2014): 473–485.https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2014.35Sarah Nicolazzo Reading Clarissa’s “Conditional Liking”: A Queer Philology, Modern Philology 112, no.11 (Jul 2015): 205–225.https://doi.org/10.1086/676008Victor J. Vitanza Imagine A Re-Thinking of Historiographies (of Rhetorics) as Atemporal, Anachronistic Post-Cinematic Practices, Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no.33 (Jun 2014): 271–286.https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2014.911564

Behaviorism and the Beginnings of Close Reading

Many of close reading's most enduring assumptions and techniques have their origins in psychological behaviorism. Beginning with I. A. Richards's critical work from the 1920s, this article demonstrates the central place of behaviorist ideas in New Critical theories of poetry. Despite explicitly disparaging Richards's behavioristic poetics, Brooks's Well Wrought Urn and Wimsatt and Beardsley's "intentional fallacy" perpetuated behaviorism's influence on literary criticism. This article traces how the New Critics translated behavioristic psychology into poetic formalism and discusses the implications of this for contemporary critical practice.