-
Dina Danon. The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: A Modern History. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2020. 241 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Annie Greene
-
Nadya Bair. The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2020. 336 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Douglas R. Nickel
-
Neetu Khanna. The Visceral Logics of Decolonization. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020. 200 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Jennifer Dubrow
-
Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan. The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. 320 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Frances Ferguson
-
Kevin Quashie. Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2021. 248 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Jayna Brown
-
Reading between Freedom and Necessity Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Matthew Garrett
-
Alenda Y. Chang. Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. 281 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Evan Wisdom-Dawson
-
Alicia Mireles Christoff. Novel Relations: Victorian Fiction and British Psychoanalysis. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2020. 288 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Sarah Tindal Kareem
-
Michel Mourlet’s “On a Misunderstood Art (1959)”: Plunging Back into the Screen Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Tom Gunning
-
-
Tessa Morris-Suzuki. Japan’s Living Politics: Grassroots Action and the Crises of Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 236 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Kim Brandt
-
Max Weber’s Confucian Care of the Self Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Chunjie Zhang
-
Ryan Johnson. Transnationalism and Translation in Modern Chinese, English, French and Japanese Literatures. New York: Anthem Press, 2021. 216 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Olga V. Solovieva
-
-
Dora Zhang. Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 246 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Douglas Mao
-
Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa. The Memory Work of Jewish Spain. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2020. 390 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo
-
On a Misunderstood Art (1959) Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Michel Mourlet,Gila Walker
-
Andrea Gadberry. Cartesian Poetics: The Art of Thinking. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 206 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Timothy M. Harrison
-
Dispossession and Discontinuity: The Impact of the 1967 War on Palestinian Thought Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Manar H. Makhoul
-
Archiving Praxis: For Palestine and Beyond Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Ann Laura Stoler
-
The Future Will Not Be Calculated: Neural Nets, Neoliberalism, and Reactionary Politics Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Orit Halpern
This article traces the relationship between neoliberal thought and neural networks through the work of Friedrich Hayek, Donald O. Hebb, and Frank Rosenblatt. For all three, networked systems could accomplish acts of evolution, change, and learning impossible for individual neurons or subjects—minds, machines, and economies could therefore all autonomously evolve and adapt without government. These
-
Data as Symbolic Form: Datafication and the Imaginary Media of W. E. B. Du Bois Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 David Bering-Porter
This article explores datafication as a speculative discourse that fundamentally and instrumentally misunderstands data, not as a representational system, but as an ontology. This analysis of datafication takes a semiotic and media-archaeological approach to datafication, understanding it as an imaginary media system, and the article looks to supplementary discourses in data visualization and big data
-
Deborah A. Starr Togo Mizrahi and the Making of Egyptian Cinema. Stanford, Calif.: University of California Press, 2020. 252 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Ghenwa Hayek
-
Eugene T. Richardson. Epidemic Illusions: On the Coloniality of Global Public Health. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2020. 224 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Alen Agaronov
-
Joan Wallach Scott On the Judgment of History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. 114 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Lorraine Daston
-
From Work to Proof of Work: Meaning and Value after Blockchain Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Jeffrey West Kirkwood
The price of Bitcoin is once more soaring. From early October 2020 to early January 2021, the price of a single Bitcoin token went from roughly $10,000 to nearly $65,000, reinspiring the hopes of the crypto-faithful in the inevitability of a future beyond centralized banking and leaving the rest to dread the jargon of computational libertarianism. The speculative betting driving this recent price action
-
Maia Kotrosits. The Lives of Objects: Material Culture, Experience and the Real in the History of Early Christianity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 243 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Caroline Bynum
-
Anahid Nersessian. The Calamity Form: On Poetry and Social Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 240 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Marjorie Levinson
-
Recursive Philosophy and Negative Machines Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Luciana Parisi
What has philosophy become after computation? Critical positions about what counts as intelligence, reason, and thinking have addressed this question by reenvisioning and pushing debates about the modern question of technology towards new radical visions. Artificial intelligence, it is argued, is replacing transcendental metaphysics with aggregates of data resulting in predictive modes of decision-making
-
Bernard E. Harcourt. Critique and Praxis: A Radical Critical Philosophy of Illusions, Values, and Actions. New York: Columbia University Press. 696 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Daniele Lorenzini
-
Karim Mattar. Specters of World Literature: Orientalism, Modernity, and the Novel in the Middle East. Edinburg: Edinburg University Press, 2020. 360 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Yasmine Khayyat
-
Terry Smith. Art to Come: Histories of Contemporary Art. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019. 456 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Martha Buskirk
-
Jonathan Rauch. The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2021. 280 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Jeff Frenkiewich
-
-
-
Artificial Antisemitism: Critical Theory in the Age of Datafication Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Matthew Handelman
This article is a critical genealogy of Tay, an artificial-intelligence chatbot that Microsoft released on Twitter in 2016, which was quickly hijacked by internet trolls to reproduce racist, misogynist, and antisemitic language. Tay’s repetition and production of hate speech calls for an approach that draws on both media and cultural theory—the Frankfurt School’s dialectical analyses of language and
-
Zeynep Çelik Alexander and John May. Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. 262 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Cristóbal Amunátegui
-
Garrett Stewart. Cinemachines: An Essay on Media and Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 201 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Gregory Zinman
-
Marc Steinberg. The Platform Economy: How Japan Transformed the Consumer Internet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. 297 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Laura Lee
-
Sean Cubitt. Anecdotal Evidence: Ecocritique from Hollywood to the Mass Image. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 305 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Graig Uhlin
-
Lee Wallace. Reattachment Theory: Queer Cinema of Remarriage. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020. 247 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Elizabeth Freeman
-
Mana Kia. Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin Before Nationalism. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2020. 371 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Alireza Doostdar
-
Computation and Interpretation in Literary Studies Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 John Mulligan
The article suggests that the best examples of textual work in the computational humanities are best understood as motivated by aesthetic concerns with the constraints placed on literature by computation’s cultural hegemony. To draw these concerns out, I adopt a middle-distant depth of field, examining the strange epistemology and unexpected aesthetic dimension of numerical culture’s encounters with
-
Walt Hunter. Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019. 192 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Stephanie Burt
-
Critical Response II Reply to John Brenkman Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Jonathan Kramnick
“Criticism and Truth” focused on the epistemology of close reading, examining how that core practice of literary critical writing is a distinctive way of knowing. Behind that endeavor was the idea that defending the good standing of the discipline of literary studies might be a worthwhile thing to do at amoment of real peril for higher education. That peril has only deepened since I wrote the essay
-
Susanne von Falkenhausen. Beyond the Mirror: Seeing in Art History and Visual Culture Studies. Bielefeld: transcript, 2020. 251 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Andrei Pop
-
On the Ruins of What’s to Come, I Stand: Time and Devastation in Syrian Cultural Production since 2011 Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Anne-Marie McManus
Ten years after the popular uprising that became a brutal war, Syrian and Syrian-Palestinian authors are engaged in the struggle to craft a historical consciousness that can acknowledge and mourn for their recent revolutionary past without reifying it. As they write in and of material, political, and social ruin, their works echo collective traumas in regional memory: the Palestinian nakba, the rise
-
Critical Response I A Response to Jonathan Kramnick, “Criticism and Truth” Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 John Brenkman
Jonathan Kramnick opens “Criticism and Truth” with a question as bold as his title: “Does literary criticism tell truths about the world?” (Jonathan Kramnick, “Criticism and Truth,” Critical Inquiry 47 [Winter 2021]: 218). The question immediately acquires two prongs. The question “of telling truths about the world itself” will have to hinge on making “true statements about literary texts” (p. 218)
-
Cressida J. Heyes. Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020. 192 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Jayne Lewis
-
Harry Harootunian. The Unspoken as Heritage: The Armenian Genocide and Its Unaccounted Lives. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 178 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Werner Sollors
-
Iconoclash in Northern Italy circa 1500 Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg,Joseph Leo Koerner
This article draws together two works created in late fifteenth-century Mantua. Although radically different in kind, they were borne from the same acts of violence: Andrea Mantegna’s Madonna of Victory and a responsum about Jewish religious law by Rabbi Joseph Colon. Mantegna’s altarpiece, painted to commemorate the bloody battle of Fornova as a Gonzaga victory, was paid for by Daniele Norsa; Norsa
-
Gregory Zinman. Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts. Oakland, Calif.: University of California Press, 2020. 392 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Ken Eisenstein
-
Peter Limbrick. Arab Modernism as World Cinema: The Films of Moumen Smihi. Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. 302 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Khalid Lyamlahy
-
The Art of Disciplined Imagination: Prediction, Scenarios, and Other Speculative Infrastructures Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-06-01 Theo Reeves-Evison
Contemporary art is brimming with images of a future shaped by environmental destruction, technological innovation, and new forms of sociality. This article looks beyond the content of such images in order to examine the infrastructures that underpin them. Paying attention to two key infrastructures in particular—the Cold War faith in prediction and the extraordinary explosion of scenario planning
-
Eliza Steinbock. Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019. 248 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-06-01 Nicole Morse
-
Hans Blumenberg. History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader. Trans. Hannes Bajohr, Florian Fuchs, and Joe Paul Kroll. New York: Cornell University Press, 2020. 609 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-06-01 Bruce J. Krajewski
-
Geraldine Heng. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 510 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-06-01 Cord J. Whitaker
-
James J. Hodge. Sensations of History: Animation and New Media Art. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. 232 pp. Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-06-01 Shane Denson
-
The Philological Apparatus: Science, Text, and Nation in the Nineteenth Century Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-06-01 Paul Michael Kurtz
Philology haunts the humanities, through both its defendants and its detractors. This article examines the construction of philology as the premier science of the long nineteenth century in Europe. It aims to bring the history of philology up to date by taking it seriously as a science and giving it the kind of treatment that has dominated the history of science for the last generation: to reveal how
-
Microbiomimesis: Bacteria, Our Cognitive Collaborators Critical Inquiry (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2021-06-01 N. Katherine Hayles
With roots in Greek drama, mimesis has recently undergone expansion into an unexpected domain: microbial resistance to viruses. Research revealed that bacteria copy portions of the DNA of attacking viruses and incorporate them into their own DNA. When a virus attacks again, the bacteria generate matching RNA sequences that, together with the Cas9 protein, enable them to recognize the virus and cut