Critical Inquiry

"In The Share of Perspective, Alloa has gathered arrows launched into the future by other thinkers and artists, but he has also trimmed his own to let loose into the future of the humanities itself."

New in review, Jae Emerling on Emmanuel Alloa's The Share of Perspective, translated by Nils F. Schott: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/jae_emerling_reviews_the_share_of_perspective/

RIP JOEL SNYDER (COEDITOR, CONTRIBUTOR, AND CONSULTING EDITOR)

"The most obvious moral risk centers on one aspect of the 'cardinal distinction' between people and imaginary people: everything that there is to know about an imaginary person is available in the literary corpus that produces and sustains the imaginary person."

From our Autumn 2007 issue, read Candace Vogler's "The Moral of the Story": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/526086

"To propose an ecology of images as a project of theoretical inquiry, therefore, Szendy must find an alternative lineage of interlocutors who unapologetically grant imagery a vital ontological status. But before doing so, he must also explain how contemporary imagery necessitates, and justifies, such a turn."

New in review, Kyle Sossamon on Peter Szendy's For an Ecology of Images, translated by Marco Roth: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/kyle_sossamon_reviews_for_an_ecology_of_images/

"In short for a photograph to be truly antitheatrical for Barthes it must somehow carry within it a kind of ontological guarantee that it was not intended to be so by the photographer—a requirement that goes well beyond anything to be found in Diderot or for that matter any eighteenth‐ or nineteenth‐century critic or theorist."

From our Spring 2005 issue, read Michael Fried's "Barthes’s Punctum": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/430984

"His personal encounters with certain politico-ethical circumstances, be it attending a small ceremonial gathering with Anishinaabe men in rural Minnesota or receiving a gift from a stranger in Nablus, productively frame the questions through which he engages with Wynter, Said, and Arendt."

New in review, Santasil Mallik on Benjamin P. Davis's Another Humanity: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/santasil_mallik_reviews_another_humanity/

"A series of milieus is folded into the practice of sonocytology. Each milieu is an array of relations linked to other milieus. There are the milieus of the scientist, who might be ensconced in a sound- and vibration-free room (manipulating the probe of an AFM, for example) or sitting in front of a computer listening to the sounds of yeast flood from speakers into the lab."

From our Winter 2009 issue, read Sophia Roosth's "Screaming Yeast": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/596646

"Alaimo’s exempla stretch across a fascinatingly heterogeneous array of genres, from photography and film to gallery and website exhibits to memoir, journalism, speculative fiction and much more."

New in review, Lawrence Buell on Stacy Alaimo's The Abyss Stares Back: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/lawrence_buell_reviews_the_abyss_stares_back/

"But the disruptive force of such theological polemics lies in the fact that to***co is initially understood not as papist or even European, but as radically heathen, primitive, and alien. The genealogy connecting to***co and the devil takes us not only through Rome but finally to the New World and its racial otherness."

From our Autumn 2003 issue, read Dennis Kezar's "Shakespeare’s Addictions": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/380806

"The voice of an orator, or documentarian, enlists and reveals desires, lacks, and longings. It charts a path through the stuff of the world that gives body to dreams and substance to principles. Speaking, giving voice to a view of the world, makes possible the necessary conditions of visibility to see things anew, to see, as if for the first time, what had, until now, escaped notice."

From our Autumn 2008 issue, read Bill Nichols's "Documentary Reenactment and the Fantasmatic Subject": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/595629