It is our conviction that existing models of criticism privilege and sustain prevailing hegemonies—and thus that critical form is in urgent need of intervention and innovation.

   — Jenny Cookson and Emma Gomis

Critical writing, as a genre, is too often taken for granted in academic circles, valued for its clarity or a vague “goodness” of its prose, as if the role of critical writing is simply to transmit knowledge, and that all types of knowledge can be equally transmitted by criticism’s fixed form. But critical writing is not neutral; it encodes values and hierarchies onto its “content.” By attending only to that content, and ignoring the form, we risk affixing ourselves to prevailing hegemonies and affixing prevailing hegemonies in time.

As the dominant mode of knowledge production deployed within the humanities, it is essential that we reflect on the assumptions, biases, and norms that are sustained by standard models of critical writing. This panel explores work that reimagines what critical writing might be capable of doing. How might we write against the grain of disciplinary conventions? How can the critical form be a site of epistemological disruption? What happens if our writing is weird, unruly or vulnerable; hybrid or experimental? What happens when we push the limits and conventions of the form in order to generate new possibilities of critical engagement, and to regenerate possibilities that have been ignored, dismissed, or partitioned from sight?

This panel invites talks that are interested in thinking differently about the critical form, including talks on individual pieces of innovative critical writing or critical writers, that theorize and/or perform different possibilities in critical writing, that recover ignored or lost critical writers, or that take up the form of critical writing in new and different ways.

Submit a 200-300 word abstract through the NeMLA portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21846