Mode Of Critique Research Articles

Getting “Uppity” with Milton; or Because My Mom Politely Asked: “Was Milton Racist?”

ABSTRACT This article serves as a wake-up call for more early modern critics to pursue a new cultural mode of literary criticism in Milton studies. In examining select racialized moments in Milton's works, the author acknowledges the present moment as an acceptable time for responsibly and forthrightly interpreting race and blackness as a metalanguage and intertext of marginalizing Otherness throughout the canon of one of English literature's most revered poets. The author contends that unorthodox receptions of Milton by black authors such as Ishmael Reed and Toni Morrison can help to theorize race in Milton's writings.

Talking Books: The Paratextuality of African Literary Podcasts

Recently, literary critics have grown concerned that serious literary criticism is slowly being replaced by a literary culture of endorsement that has proliferated online. They fear that ‘hot takes,’ listicles and simplified systems of ranking books (‘buy or don’t buy,’ star ratings and so on) are gaining cultural currency while serious analysis and critique is going out of style. One critic, Christian Lorentzen, even wonders: ‘What if a generation of writers grew up with nobody to criticize them?’ At the same time, reviews, interviews and other content concerning African literature have become widely available online. In particular, African literary podcasts have become increasingly popular and influential. By examining the nature of paratextuality, via Gérard Genette, in reference to African literary podcasts, this article examines whether African literary podcasts are contributing to this decline, offering audio equivalents of traditional reviews or creating an innovative mode of critique. It concludes that African literary podcasts are sui generis and provide both substantive critique and an outlet for voices traditionally marginalized from mainstream literary discourse.

Religious Reformation and the Crisis of Providentialism in Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611): A Cultural Materialist Reading

The early modern period in England is characterised by philosophical and moral debates over the meaning and pertinence of Christian beliefs and teachings. One of the most controversial topics in this epoch is God’s providence and its supposed impacts on man’s daily life. In the wake of the Reformation and emerging philosophical schools, particularly in the second half of the sixteenth century, Providentialism was seriously put into question and the meaning and influences of God’s providence were, therefore, investigated. Epicureans and Calvinists were two prominent groups of religious reformists who cast doubt upon the validity and pertinence of Christian Providentialism as it was taught during the medieval period. These intellectual and philosophical debates were reflected in the literary productions of the age in general, and in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in particular. Cyril Tourneur is one of the early modern English playwrights who inquired into the meaning and relevance of Providentialism in his last play, The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611). Adhering to a cultural materialist mode of criticism, I will show in this paper that Tourneur is a dissident dramatist who separates the realm of God’s divinity from man’s rational capacity in his tragedy and anticipates, hence, the emergence and development of new religious and philosophical visions in the Renaissance.

Poetik der Kritik – Ästhetik des Deutens

Abstract Some of the mainly unchartered territories in literary criticism are the implications of Susan Sontag’s frontal attack on traditional hermeneutical practices in Against Interpretation (1969). This contribution to investigations into the modes of interpretation attempts to draw constructive consequences from this provocation and investigate the notion of a ›poetics of criticism‹ emanating into what can be called the ›aesthetics of interpretation‹. In so doing, it explores the Romantic backdrop of this discourse through examining Friedrich Schlegel’s plea for a ›poetization‹ of critique and his demand to turn critical approaches into aesthetic, if not artistic, acts. Then, these reflections examine notions of perception or Anschauung as a cornerstone of comprehension; discuss poetic renderings of thought with Nietzsche, who epitomizes the fusion of reflection and aesthetic production; single out one of Gottfried Benn’s early poems (»Kreislauf«) as an object for putting aesthetic interpretation into practice given the specific character of this Expressionistic text; and, finally, assess elements of theories of recognition in terms of aesthetic practice with specific reference to a paragraph in early Adorno, which highlights cognitive transformation processes as matters of aesthetic experience. Thus, this essay illustrates the interrelationship between critical theory and practice as an aesthetic act, which takes into account the significance of Sontag’s challenge, exemplifying the necessity of finding a language register that can claim to strive towards adequacy in relation to the (artistic) object of criticism without compromising analytical rigour. The argument developed in this contribution towards an aesthetics of interpretation begins with a critical appreciation of various forms and modes of criticism in literature and other aspects of artistic expression. It centres on the significance of the dialogue as an explorative means of critical discourse, ranging from Friedrich Schlegel to Hugo von Hofmannsthal and indeed Hans Magnus Enzensberger. With the (fictive) dialogue as an instrument of aesthetic judgement, ›experience‹ entered the stage of literary criticism negotiating ambivalences and considering alternative points of view often generated from the texts under consideration. In terms of the ambivalences mentioned above, this investigation into the nature of criticism considers the notion of criticism as a form of art and an extrapolation of aesthetic reason as propagated already by Henry Kames, once even quoted by Hegel in connection with the establishing of a rationale for the critical appreciation of artistic products. It discusses the interplay of distance from, and empathy with, objects of aesthetic criticism asking to what extent the act of interpretation (Wolfgang Iser) can acquire a creative momentum of its own without distorting its true mission, namely to assess the characteristics and aesthetic qualities of specific (poetic) texts or other artistic objects. Following the closer examination of several of Nietzsche’s poems and Roland Barthes’s insistence on the segmentation of the linguistic material that constitutes a textual entity worthy of criticism, the article examines one of Gottfried Benn’s early poems (»Kreislauf«, 1912) in respect of its textual and structural dynamics, awkward sensuality as a form of negative eroticism. On the basis of a detailed linguistic, and indeed poetic, examination it shows where, when, and how literary criticism can meaningfully identify structural features as denominators for aesthetic experience. The final section is devoted to instrumentalize Adorno’s point that concepts can turn with some inevitability into images enabling the theory of cognition to acquire some credibility as a potentially fertile basis for aesthetic practice – both in literary criticism and poetic production. With a concluding reference to Paul Celan’s remark that language acquires a Being of its own and that something of existential significance occurs in the poem, this article illustrates that interpretation depends on a successful interplay of cognitive and sensual processes, which leaves criticism somewhere between aesthetic analysis and contextualization as well as between taking linguistic images metaphorically or indeed literarily. Finally, it suggests regarding aesthetic criticism as a way to assess both the actual creative process and its results as if they were involved in a ›dialogue‹ of their own. Therefore, interpretation can be seen as a process that generates its very own dynamics and procedures (i. e. ›poetics‹), either in relation to its object or in form of a juxtaposition. If the latter, the likelihood is stronger that ›interpretation‹ acquires more distinctiveness. Ultimately, however, the (quasi-performative) quality of interpretation depends on its stylistic features, the adequacy of language used, and conceptual stringency without disregarding its essential function, namely to enable a dialogue between the work of art and its recipient and the recipients amongst themselves.

The Logical Framework for Humanist Criticism: The Foundations of the World-Picture Logic Mode of Critique1

This paper presents the philosophical and theological underpinnings of the so-called “world-picture logic” mode of critique. It also outlines the arguments—empirical, transcendental and creationist—upon which the aesthetic framework depends that has the world relational picture as its object. By laying out these arguments and inquiring into the nature of what is human, it sketches the relational theology central to the “world-picture logic” mode of critique.

Teatro: No pasar. Rendimiento crítico del teatro de Roberto Suárez en su contexto de producción by Ignacio Gutiérrez Muiño

Reviewed by: Teatro: No pasar. Rendimiento crítico del teatro de Roberto Suárez en su contexto de producción by Ignacio Gutiérrez Muiño Laura V. Sández Gutiérrez Muiño, Ignacio. Teatro: No pasar. Rendimiento crítico del teatro de Roberto Suárez en su contexto de producción. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2018. 199 pp. Teatro: No pasar analyzes seven plays by Uruguayan director and playwright Roberto Suárez. The first chapter presents the structure of the book and introduces the reader to Suárez's oeuvre. The author offers a first hint of what rendimiento crítico entails by affirming that the relation between artists and audience is of crucial importance. The second chapter offers a close reading of Suárez's most recurrent dramaturgical strategies, following José Luis García Barrientos's methodology of dramatología. This chapter includes a detailed analysis of aspects such as staging, texts, characters, time, and space. These could be informative, but unfortunately they are buried in a dense, verbose structure. The author prioritizes scenes in which spectators are interpellated, yet fails to account for the spectators' responses. While there is [End Page 151] much talk about the "desdoblamiento de niveles dramáticos," the dramatic level of the audience is mostly ignored. In the third chapter, the play Bienvenido a casa is posed as a paradigmatic example of Gutiérrez's analytical framework. For Gutiérrez, this play motivates and stimulates in the audience "una actitud alerta y autoconsciente que se asocia con la noción de rendimiento crítico" (191), in the sense that it combines a front-of-the-house play with a behind-the-scenes one, thereby allowing the dramaturg to present the audience with complex dramatic structures wherein they have to continually reexamine their roles. The last chapter explains how Bienvenido a casa operates in the realm of rendimiento crítico, presenting the overworked condemnation of the referential pact as totalizante and alienating. Employing a conceptual frame based on a philosophy of language, Gutiérrez calls for a reflective, critical position that, while necessary, brings nothing new to the current state of either the theory or the history of theatre. The "political" is here "la visibilización y puesta en problema del estatuto de la representación y sus límites en el marco social y cultural actual" (152). The social and cultural realm fails to be explained, with the result that we learn very little about Uruguay's or Montevideo's political situation; the political remains constrained to a notion of the dramatic that does not exceed the referential. The poetic, imaginary, and lyric modes of criticism that close this chapter effectively illustrate Suárez's dramatic strategies. One key aspect of the critical mode—the most advanced critical stage for Gutiérrez—consists of confusing the audience as to which level of representation the dramatic situation is operating in. The book ends by defining rendimiento crítico as a "perspectiva negativa o trascendental que, desde la ficción, abre (permite) la pregunta por las condiciones y posibilidades de la representación" (185). Reading Teatro: No pasar, one cannot help but think about the bureaucratization of criticism and research. The book has the style, pace, verbosity, and appeal of a report on the development of a project. Its content is carefully developed to leave no term undefined, but it is not a very inviting read. Ultimately, the book speaks more about the conditions of this type of criticism than about Roberto Suárez's work. [End Page 152] Laura V. Sández Villanova University Copyright © 2020 Center of Latin American Studies

Casting a Literary Mammy in Diego Sánchez de Badajoz’sFarsa de la hechizera

This article analyses the theatrical representation of an unnamed black woman in Diego Sánchez de Badajoz’s Farsa de la hechizera (1523/1540–49). In doing so, I employ the term “mammy” – and, more loosely, the Castilian word “ nodriza” – in order to capture an interdisciplinary mode of literary criticism that resituates Sánchez de Badajoz’s black woman character in Renaissance Iberian cultural and literary studies. A non-passive agent who possesses traits analogous to maternal mammy figures across the African diaspora, this study argues that Sánchez de Badajoz’s black woman personage subverts the work’s suicidal galán’s aristocratic might and ultimately destabilizes his masculinity. To that end, this article sets out to demonstrate, more broadly, that scholarly interpretations of black women in early modern Iberia have overlooked the heterogeneous and subversive ways in which these women paradoxically oscillate between the antinomies of objectification and personhood.

Governing Through Relationship: A Positive Critique of School Social Work Practice in Post-Earthquake, Christchurch, New Zealand

AbstractThis article outlines some findings from an inquiry undertaken in the aftermath of 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which positive critique was used to examine the practice accounts of twelve school social workers alongside characteristics of recovery policies. Consistent with Foucault’s (1988, 2003a,b, 2013a) mode of critique and his theorisation of biopolitics and pastoral power, positive critique recognises the multiplicity and productivity of contemporary power relations operating at the populational, collective and individual levels of life. A feature of the participants’ accounts of their practices with affected schoolchildren in the recovery space is their commitment to restoring and protecting their clients’ well-being through therapeutically inclined relational practice. The Christchurch earthquake recovery strategy also sets out the provision of specialised, individual assistance for vulnerable populations excluded from ‘normal’ psychosocial recovery processes because of their inability to participate in community self-help initiatives. The findings presented in this article provide a critical space for social workers to reflect on the dimensions of their relational work that function as therapeutic governance practices that can both strengthen and resist the normative notions of vulnerability and recovering well.

Saba Mahmood on Concepts and Their Unequal Careers

How should issues of historical and cultural specificity inform both the analytics and politics of any feminist project? —Politics of Piety (1) How do we render such historical differences conceptually visible, while at the same time being attentive to the globally shared features of secularism? —Religious Difference in a Secular Age (10) ANYBODY WHO HAS SEEN Saba Mahmood engrossed in a heated debate would have seen her signature drive to question key concepts and the distinct social and political imaginaries they release in the world. In her two major works, Politics of Piety (2005) and Religious Difference in a Secular Age (2016a), Mahmood’s writings likewise deliver a searing inquiry into the universalizing ideals of freedom and equality, two core pillars of secular-liberalism that have animated feminist and secularist movements with transnational reach. Central to her scholarly ethic is a mode of critique that counters the taken-for-granted terms often translated unthinkingly across historical periods and geographic regions. Mahmood’s critical practice was one of interrogating the unequal power relations that concepts carry and as they unfold in specific times and spaces. To the extent that her vigilance was directed toward the hierarchies at play in any conceptual endeavor, she might also be remembered for her commitment to cultivating the as-yet-unforeseen ends of freedom and equality (Mahmood 2016b).

Gothic Misdirections: Troubling the Trauma Fiction Paradigm in Pat Barker’s Double Vision

ABSTRACTTrauma theory has traditionally positioned itself as an ethical mode of critique. Theorists have since criticized the development, born out of trauma theory’s ethical imperative, of a dominant trauma fiction aesthetic seeking to mimic the inaccessibility of traumatic memory, advocating the use of genres like the Gothic to voice otherwise unspeakable subject matter. However, implicating the Gothic in trauma theory’s ethical project ignores the voyeuristic impulse that drives audiences to seek out the Gothic’s pleasurable excesses. These tensions collide in Pat Barker’s Double Vision (2003), whose seemingly clichéd use of Gothic conventions belies a sophisticated metafictional interrogation of trauma fiction’s ethical complexities.

Ethnographic spectres: Representing the recent past of sexual liberation

Temporality is central to how researchers conceptualize their research and to how they produce ethnography. Drawing from research on memory and commemoration in connection with The Body Politic, the first major lesbian and gay newspaper in Canada, this article examines the uses and limits of ethnographic writing as a mode of critique in contexts where the boundary between research participants and academic audiences can be unclear. The struggle over audience reveals some of the ethical limits and conventions of ethnography, both as method and genre, as well as the ways in which struggles over historical records inform the content and scope of ethnographic records.

The City and the Stage: Performance, Genre, and Gender in Plato's Laws by Marcus Folch

Reviewed by: The City and the Stage: Performance, Genre, and Gender in Plato's Laws by Marcus Folch Susan Sauvé Meyer Marcus Folch. The City and the Stage: Performance, Genre, and Gender in Plato's Laws. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. xiii + 386 pp. Cloth, $82. Plato's last dialogue, Laws, investigates the goals, method, and history of legislation, and applies the results of this study to the task of formulating the constitution and the law code for a new city to be founded on Crete. Musical performance will be ubiquitous in this "city of the Magnesians" (860e); it is the medium by which the legislator cultivates and sustains the desirable character traits of the citizens in a busy calendar of religious festivals; its educational importance is underwritten by a psychological theory; and a theory of literary criticism identifies the criteria for selecting the works to be performed, along with the social institution (the "Chorus of Dionysus") in which that criticism is to be practiced. It is this "performance culture" of Magnesia that is the focus of Folch's study. In contrast to recent anthropological readings of the Laws that treat Plato's text as evidence for ancient practices of chorality, Folch stresses that Plato's project is normative; its aim is not simply to report but to improve upon contemporary practice. Rather than reconstruct ancient practices of musical performance from Plato's text, Folch seeks to identify the ways in which Plato's blueprint for Magnesia repurposes and revises the musical genres and gender norms of his Greek contemporaries, as well as the contours of the ideal city of the Republic. In one of the many memorable phrases in the book, "Magnesia is a palimpsest of Platonic thought and ancient practice, at once in conversation with Plato's earlier works and in a dialectic with the cultural fabric from which the second-best city is woven" (42). A substantial introductory chapter gives an excellent précis of the content and structure of the Laws and situates it in relation to the Republic and to the fourth-century political and intellectual context in which Plato is writing. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the theory of "performativity" that informs Folch's analysis and then discusses the interlocking psychological, educational, and aesthetic doctrines that underwrite the central role accorded to musical performance in the lives of Magnesia's citizens. The latter nexus of doctrines has drawn significant attention recently from philosophers working on the Laws, who will find much to agree with in Folch's well-informed and textually detailed discussion, and in particular the prominence he accords to comparisons with the Phaedrus (a welcome change from the more usual comparisons with the Republic). I confess that I found the analytical framework of "performativity" rather hard going and unduly jargon-laden; its upshot for our understanding of the Platonic doctrines, as far as I could tell, is that musical performance is not just [End Page 717] expressive of civic thoughts and ideals, but plays a role in shaping and sustaining the characters of citizens and civic institutions. While the speech act theory developed by Austin and Grice in the 1950s continues to have a lasting impact in contemporary analytical philosophy of language and mind (see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/speech-acts/#Bib), it has not generally been embraced as a useful tool of analysis by historians of philosophy. (For a philosophical polemic against the use to which the theory has been put by literary scholars, see D. Gorman, "The Use and Abuse of Speech-act Theory in Criticism," Poetics Today 20 (1999) 93–119). Chapter 2 addresses the principles of literary criticism to be practiced in the city of Magnesia by the Chorus of Dionysus, whose membership and function are explained in Book 2. Folch contrasts that model of literary criticism with the anarchic and anti-authoritarian mode of criticism ascribed to contemporary Athens in the fanciful "history" of Athenian literary criticism offered in Book 3 (700a–701b). We are not to read this alarmist lament of declining critical standards and crumbling generic boundaries as an accurate history, Folch argues, but rather as a polemic against what Plato...

Passing through difference: C.L.R. James and Henry Lefebvre

ABSTRACTThis essay offers a comparative analysis of the work of Henri Lefebvre and C.L.R. James, both key contributors to the emergence of a humanist form of Marxism in the twentieth century. Independently of each other, both writers, I show, developed a mode of critique which emphasised capitalism’s dehumanizing social effects, and which rejected a merely instrumental or utilitarian political response. Consequently, both writers placed critical emphasis on those longings and demands made evident in the insurgent politics of everyday life and popular culture; in what both conceptualised as a search for ‘happiness‘. But at the same time, the comparison is important because it makes evident the extent of the divisive intellectual legacies of empire within European Marxism. Lefebvre’s work bears in itself the marks of a racialised understanding of human relations; the ’human’ of which he speaks is limited in ways that James challenged consistently.

Migrations into the Then/There of What's Next

Research Article| December 01 2018 Migrations into the Then/There of What's Next Stacy Holman Jones Stacy Holman Jones Stacy Holman Jones is Professor in the Centre for Theatre and Performance at Monash University and in the Department of Communication Studies at California State University, Northridge. Email: stacy.holmanjones@monash.edu. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Departures in Critical Qualitative Research (2018) 7 (4): 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2018.7.4.1 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Stacy Holman Jones; Migrations into the Then/There of What's Next. Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 1 December 2018; 7 (4): 1–6. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2018.7.4.1 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentDepartures in Critical Qualitative Research Search When I took up my editorship of Departures in Critical Qualitative Research (DCQR), which was up until my selection published under the title Qualitative Communication Research, University of California Press asked me to explore the possibility of expanding the scope of the journal and rebranding and redefining the aims of the publication. Thus, DCQR was conceived and launched. The new aim of the journal was to provide a forum for scholars across disciplines to consider, contest, and creatively reimagine the form, purpose, and mission of their work. The journal sought to feature essays charting scholarly and theoretical developments in critical qualitative research, exemplars of methodological innovation, and inventive demonstrations of research as an intervention and mode of critique. It was my hope that the journal would performatively embody the notion of departure in its fullest sense by taking seriously the notion of what a new course of... You do not currently have access to this content.

John Donne and Baroque Allegory: The Aesthetics of Fragmentation. Hugh Grady. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2017. Pp. viii+228.

<i>John Donne and Baroque Allegory: The Aesthetics of Fragmentation</i>. Hugh Grady. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2017. Pp. viii+228.

Aggregation, Public Criticism, and the History of Reading Big Data

This essay traces the history of ideas behind the critical methods of distant reading and macroanalysis, modes of criticism enabled by the rise of the science, media, and technology of aggregation. I situate these methods in the intellectual shifts marked by the advent of modern polling practices, computational census technologies, post-1945 marketing strategies, and other methods of analyzing an aggregated public. Drawing on work by Sarah E. Igo, Mary Poovey, Bill Kovarik, and others, I demonstrate that the ideas legitimated through these shifts in technology and public sentiment are fundamental to the types of claims made in the “big data” digital humanities. This attention to intellectual history raises important problems and qualifications for big data methods like distant reading, particularly regarding their underlying assumptions about the publics of literary history.

On the Interrelation of Production and Reproduction

Contemporary social and political theorists generally recognise that Marx and Engels’ critical analysis of capitalist society centres on the production of value through the production of things. However, what is often unrecognised in considerations of Marx and Engels is how their analysis is based on the interrelation of production and reproduction. Nevertheless, the implications of this interrelation for feminist critique are explored in the writings of Marx and Engels only tangentially. These implications are developed from Marx’s analysis by Leopoldina Fortunati and Silvia Federici into a singular synthesis of the Marxist and feminist modes of critique. This development deserves greater recognition, and this essay will seek to articulate how the social implications of this interrelation (1) are expressed to a limited extent in the classical texts of Marxism and (2) are developed by Fortunati and Federici into the analytic framework of social reproduction as the core of Marxist-feminist revolutionary struggle.

La militancia de la Teoría

La crítica se ha convertido en la principal forma de practicar la teoría, al menos aquella teoría concebida como intervención política. Sin embargo, percibo hoy en día una creciente insatisfacción con respecto a las posibilidades políticas de la crítica. Ciertamente, el término crítica abarca un amplio abanico de prácticas, como los medios relativamente genéricos para encontrar defectos, técnicas que revelan las figuras de poder que operan en los discursos dominantes y las ideologías e incluso los procesos kantianos específicos que investigan los límites del entendimiento humano, la razón o el juicio. Las diferencias existentes entre tales modos de la crítica son significativas, pero todos ellos enfrentan a día de hoy la acusación de que son insuficientes como métodos políticos en la medida en que carecen tanto de la capacidad de transformar tanto las estructuras de poder existentes como de crear acuerdos sociales alternativos. Durante el último periodo de su vida, Michel Foucault articuló como alternativa a la crítica una forma de militancia filosófica y política que brinda abundantes posibilidades para la teoría ahora.

On Happiness and Critique. From Bouquet V to ´possible elsewheres´

The paper explores the relationship of happiness and critique. It is a reflection on a decade of being trained in and practicing philosophical critique. It is a reflection on experiences I had during teaching on social justice, inclusion and diversity; and it is a reflection on the on-going debate on negative vs. affirmative forms of critique within feminist philosophy. It is also an exercise in imagining a transformation of our critical practices, where the embrace of more affirmative (rather than destructive-negative) modes of critique does not entail overlooking or turning a blind eye to the barriers that unjustly restrain some movements and allow for others' privileges to persist. I suggest that a diffractive approach to critique would allow for joyfully interchanging and alternating appropriate modes of debunking, of being the killjoy against sedimentations that weigh some of us down, with other modes of critique which allow us to augment and lift up examples of already on-going structural change.

Continental Scope and Its Discontents

Continental Scope and Its Discontents Ankhi Mukherjee (bio) In a memorable scene in Orange is the New Black, the web television series created by Jenji Kohan for Netflix, the inmate Suzanne Warren, aka "Crazy Eyes," played with manic and poetic fury by Uzo Aduba, recites a Shakespeare monologue to hapless teenage visitors to the prison: You common cry of curs! whose breath I hateAs reek o' the rotten fens, whose loves I prizeAs the dead carcasses of unburied menThat do corrupt my air, I banish you{And here remain with your uncertainty!… thus I turn my back.There is a world elsewhere} (Shakespeare 2013, 316–17) This occurs in season 1, episode 11 of the popular television series. A group of juvenile delinquents is visiting Litchfield, a minimum-security federal prison in upstate New York, and the inmates have been asked to "act tough" to scare the girls away from leading a life of crime. Suzanne is aggrieved that other prisons get to do "Shakespeare and shit" and seizes this as an acting opportunity. Suzanne suffers from mental illness, aggravated now by stressors associated with the degrading conditions of prison life. She receives no care in captivity and is terrified of being returned to "Psych" or the psychiatric unit of [End Page 814] the prison, widely acknowledged to be more tormenting than SHU, or solitary confinement. An adopted child of white middle-class parents who are loving but obtuse to Suzanne's emergent mental health needs, the flashbacks show a jagged process of identity formation marked by painful social alienation, attachment disorders, and borderline personality traits. The adoptive mother does not engage with the pain caused by Suzanne's inarguable blackness in a predominantly white circle of family and friends: in a rare moment of haptic connection experienced by the child Suzanne, we see an African-American nurse calm her down at hospital by offering to fix her hair. In Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Act III, scene iii begins at the Forum in Rome, addressing the howling crowd to whom Coriolanus has been appealing for the title of Consul, and who have demanded his banishment in ungrateful response. The words lend themselves surprisingly well to Suzanne Warren's improvised theatre. She is the tragic wounded hero to the plebeians, alone (another Coriolanus watchword) in the forced intimacy of a crowd of common people. Suzanne delivers the lines with aplomb, the intense alliteration of common/cry/curs or reek/rotten building up to the exhalation of "my AIIIR." The curious displacement whereby Coriolanus's "I banish you" becomes the coerced and choiceless self-banishment of "I turn my back/There is a world elsewhere" adds poignancy to this mock assumption of sovereign power in Litchfield's ongoing drama of the dispossessed. For this reader, this scene proleptically posits some of the meditations put forth in Thinking Literature Across Continents, by Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller (2016): on why literature matters; on its transnational mobility and lability as well as its transcultural knots and glitches; on the unstable and often self-cancelling relationship between pedagogies and performance; on literature as the ground of comparison between disparate entities, whose placeholders, in this instance, are Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Orange Is the New Black's Suzanne Warren. The authors, however, do not discuss Orange is the New Black or any cultural form of literary transmission remotely relatable to this prison drama. And therein lies a glaring oversight of work. Let me clarify that I am not holding Ghosh and Miller responsible for not watching Orange Is the New Black or Netflix or even popular television entertainments (Miller, for one, openly decries the fate of literature in "an age of prestidigitalization" {68}). I will, however, begin my critique of the book by asking why, given the excursive as well as inclusive pedagogies informing this unique transcontinental collaboration, do we end up discussing (again) "The [End Page 815] Daffodils" and Derrida, Beckett, Arnold, Tagore and Wallace Stevens, Sanskrit literary theory and Chinese classics, not undiscovered or non-credentialised authors, texts, and literary milieu? Why does a mode of critique that proudly identifies itself as the "(in)fusion-transnow thesis" (7) not engage with...