Who Killed Critique?

Abstract

The question “what comes after critique?” allows for two contrasting kinds of answers. The first expresses our hopes and aspirations; it elaborates a path that we would like our discipline to follow and generously asks us to make a case for the most worthy among critique’s possible successors. The question, however, could also be understood to solicit a different kind of answer, one that stresses the likelihood or inevitability of certain critical trends rather than the opportunities offered by the waning of current critical models. In the chapter that follows, I attempt to answer the second version of the question by focusing on two types of literary criticism that have challenged and, to some extent, already transformed critique as is it applied to literary texts.