Vol. 32, No. 1-2 [2024]
This issue conveys two urgent and co-articulated thematic orientations: first, from philosophy and critical theory, the necessity of sustaining criticality for concepts within specific, if provisional and pragmatic, contexts, structures, organization and systems; and second, from environmentalism, the program both for making sense of and contesting unfolding ecological crises and ecocide. The two words together encompass environment in an ecological sense and also call attention to how thinking itself exists in immanent and material ways integral to nature. Presuming a built world in a profound sense means addressing entanglements of culture and nature in critical concepts like ecology, infrastructure, contagion, infection, contamination, deep time, and, indeed, the very language of critical theory itself. Further, they entail a future orientation to systems and environments that the old humanist legacies and doxas have repeatedly failed. In Critical Environments (1998), Cary Wolfe challenged theory “to renew its commitment to theoretical heterodoxy by confronting its own orthodoxy with . . . the problem of the ‘outside’ of theory”: “What started out as a revisionist theoretical program devoted to breaking down logocentrism and the last vestiges of humanism has instead wound up reinstating ‘a rigid divide between the human and the nonhuman’ that leads to a pervasive ‘cultural solipsism.’” Papers will pursue such questions as the following: What might commitment to a critical environment of theoretical heterodoxy look like? How can we discern an “outside” of theory already inside nature? How might theorizing impasses in humanism think through and contest environmental crises and ecocide without nihilism or quietism or without reinscribing anthropomorphism as a last breath for—or last gasp of—human hubris?
Focus Editors: Aaron Jaffe and Robin Truth Goodman
Jeffrey R. Di Leo
Editor’s NoteAaron Jaffe
The Introduction to Critical EnvironmentsJan Overwijk
The Eco-Marxist Problematic: Value Between Economy and EcologyRobin Truth Goodman
Sick Lit: Zombie Apparatus and Ideology’s SeveranceNicole Simek
The Plantationocene, or Critique Under a Black HorizonZahi Zalloua
The Politics of the FacelessJane Gallop
Eli Clare: Outsider Theory, the Environment, and Brilliant ImperfectionClint Burnham
Mari Ruti and Climate GriefAlison Sperling
Nonbinary/NaturesJeffrey R. Di Leo
The Jargon of Critical EnvironmentsKenneth J. Saltman
How Resilience Became the Content of Digital Educational Privatization and Other Disasters of ResilienceDerek Woods
Notes On Abstract CarbonMichael F. Miller
Technical Rationality and the Environmental Turn: The Case of Holly Herndon’s OikosCristina Iuli
Information without Meaning in Jeff VanderMeer’s Trilogy of Area XEdward P. Dallis-Comentale
Total Admin: The College Campus as Critical Environment in Pynchon’s VinelandCary Wolfe
The Dreams of SympoiesisTimothy Hinton
The Materialism of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and MeUbaraj Katawal
Local Traditions, Colonial Modernity and the Politics of Pressure: Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small ThingsThomas A. Laughlin
It’s All about the Benjamin(s), or, Fredric Jameson’s Precursor in Literary Criticism and TheoryKoonyong Kim
“Breaking Out of the Windless Present”: Jameson’s Representation of the Benjaminian Cosmos and History in The Benjamin FilesMaria Elisa Cevasco
A Dialectician Entre NousSami Khatib
History Disintegrates into ImagesJane Gallop, Eric Hayot, E. L. McCallum, Gary Weissman
The Ethics of Close Reading?Jane Gallop
The Ethics of Close ReadingGary Weissman
On Aggressive Close ReadingE. L. McCallum
Is the Ethics of Close Reading Feminist? Or, Friends of Close ReadersJohanna Winant
How Close Reading Goes OffRobert Higney
From the English School to the ArchiveYael Segalovitz
Close Reading Beyond the Anglophone OrbitFaye Halpern
Against the Ethics of Close Reading: Close Readers, Lay Readers, and Critical HumilityPaula M. L. Moya
Some Propositions on Close ReadingEric Hayot
Close Reading Needs a Better Theory of ActualityPaul Fleming
Where to Begin?Jeffrey R. Di Leo
Targeting Tenure in Dark Academe: Antitheory, Neoliberalism, and the New Assault on Academic FreedomDaniel T. O’Hara
The Foreclosure of America and the Emergence of AutomaniaNicole Simek
Race and Sex ReduxRobert T. Tally Jr.
“I’m as mad as Hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore”: Anger, Critique, and the Culture Wars 2.0Zahi Zalloua
Reckoning with America’s Anti-Blackness: From Repression to Disavowal—and BeyondJeffrey J. Williams
The Stance of Criticism: An Interview with David ScottJeffrey J. Williams
Inside the Walls: An Interview with Doran LarsonBenjamin Schreier
Solidarity and the Palestinian Cause: Indigeneity, Blackness, and the Promise of Universality by Zahi Zalloua (review)Bryan Counter
In Defense of Secrets by Anne Dufourmantelle (review)Abhisek Ghosal
An Introduction to the Blue Humanities by Steve Mentz (review)Jean-François Vernay
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion ed. by Patrick Colm Hogan, Bradley J. Irish, and Lalita Pandit Hogan (review)Jason Groves
The Great Dismissal: Memoir of the Cultural Demolition Derby, 2015–2022 by Henry Sussman (review)Aaron Chandler
The Critical Situation: Vexed Perspectives in Postmodern Literary Studies by Robert T. Tally Jr. (review)Bryan Counter
Soundtracked Books from the Acoustic Era to the Digital Age: A Century of “Books That Sing” by Justin St. Clair (review)Daniel Rosenberg Nutters
Attending to the Literary: The Distinctiveness of Literature by Alan Singer (review)