We Have Never Been Critical: Toward the Novel as Critique

Kornbluh, Anna

doi:10.1215/00295132-4195016

Cited by 16 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…Thus, I both want to affirm the need to think about totality and recognize the dialectical tensions and antagonisms that necessarily are involved in such a thinking. Borrowing my language from Anna Kornbluh's compelling argument that "we have never been critical" (which in turn echoes while also challenging Latour's We Have Never Been Modern), I am going to assert three statements (Kornbluh 2017;Latour 1993). These statements need to be thought in dialectical contradiction with each other.…”

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confidence: 98%

The Humanities as Contradiction: Against the New Enclosures

Breu

2018

Humanities

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This essay begins by surveying our current moment in the humanities, diagnosing the language of crisis that frames much of the discourse about them. It argues that the crisis is a manufactured economic one not a symbolic one. The problems with many recent proposals—such as the new aestheticism, surface reading, and postcritique—is that they attempt to solve an economic crisis on the level of symbolic capital. They try to save the humanities by redisciplining them and making them mirror various forms amateur inquiry. I describe these approaches as the new enclosures, attempts at returning the humanities to disciplinarity with the hopes that administrative and neoliberal forces will find what we do more palatable. Instead of attempting to appease such forces by being pliant and apolitical, we need a new workerist militancy (daring to be “bad workers” from the point of view of neoliberal managerial rhetorics) to combat the economic crisis produced by neoliberalism. Meanwhile, on the level of knowledge production, the humanities need to resist the demand to shrink the scope of their inquiry to the disciplinary. The humanities, at their best, have been interdisciplinary. They have foregrounded both the subject of the human and all the complex forces that shape, limit, and exist in relationship and contradiction with the human. The essay concludes by arguing that the humanities, to resist neoliberal symbolic logics, need to embrace both a critical humanism, and the crucial challenges to this humanism that go by the name of antihumanism and posthumanism. It is only by putting these three discourses in negative dialectical tension with each other that we can begin to imagine a reinvigorated humanities that can address the challenges of the twenty-first century.

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confidence: 98%

The Humanities as Contradiction: Against the New Enclosures

Breu

2018

Humanities

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“… 6. Kornbluh credits Fredric Jameson with recognizing this constructive dimension of literature: “Jameson’s method of reading for form tacitly illustrates that formal actuation in the novel might itself model utopian constructions — its articulated levels, its resonant cohesion, its structural inclusion” (2017: 405). …”

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confidence: 99%

The meanings of postcolonial critique

Tsang

2024

Literature, Critique, and Empire Today

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This essay examines the recent debates on critique and postcritique and how they might inform postcolonial studies. In particular, the essay argues for the critical purchase of colonial attachments. It demonstrates that the very impropriety of those attachments makes them effective tools for critique. Turning to Sam Selvon’s last novel Moses Migrating, the essay shows that the protagonist’s unwavering devotion to Britain, far from being uncritical, in fact troubles or even displaces two paradigms of self-positioning in the postcolonial world: citizenship and lineage. The novel thus models a postcolonial critique that derives its force less from a holistic opposition to colonial mentality than from a willingness to attend to, dwell on, and stay with colonial attachments.

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“…Anna Kornbluh describes this method of reading the novel as "a mode of knowing (knowing language, knowing possibility, knowing sociality), precisely in the tradition of critique." 2 Early in the novel the reader learns that "the old notebooks are all in broken Spanish or corrupt Latin that no one understands without months of research in old grammars. Lecha had already done translation work, and her notebooks contained narratives in English."…”

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Silko’s Vévé and the Web of Differing Versions

Gómez¹

2019

American Indian Culture and Research Journal

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In Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko asks, who has spiritual possession of the Americas? This question cannot be answered outside of Silko’s premises: it is impossible for outsiders to know where Africa ends and America begins; and the truth resides in the web of differing versions. In this essay, I maintain that Silko’s novel is written as a vévé—a crossroads where Gods and ancestors are subjects capable of narration. Using Silko’s language philosophy and a through close reading of Clinton’s notebooks and radio broadcasts, I argue that slavery/colonization and black/Indian must always be thought together.

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We Have Never Been Critical: Toward the Novel as Critique

Cited by 16 publications

References 3 publications

The Humanities as Contradiction: Against the New Enclosures

The Humanities as Contradiction: Against the New Enclosures

The meanings of postcolonial critique

Silko’s Vévé and the Web of Differing Versions

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