Critiquing Critique: Post-Critique, New Realisms, and Materialisms (ACLA 2021)
We inhabit a post-critical moment. In literary and cultural studies, the post-critical turn has yielded new modes of reading, while galvanizing new efforts to think beyond—challenging or perhaps circumventing altogether—the limits of critique. These efforts are not limited, however, to the fields of literary and cultural studies; they track suggestively with new tendencies in contemporary philosophy, namely “New Realism” and its polemic antagonism towards the (loosely branded) legacy of critical theory, which has arguably held a theoretical monopoly in spheres of the humanities not taken with the scientific worldview.