Critical Inquiry
@criticalinquiry
Founded in 1974, Critical Inquiry is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed journal devoted to the best critical thought in the arts and humanities.
"Modern American poetry, she argues, reasons inductively rather than deductively, moving from particulars towards provisional generalities rather than letting a governing intuition shine through it." Sneha Chowdhury on Johanna Winant's Lyric Logic: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/sneha_chowdh...
"The painting is calculated to engage our amazement . . . by its very immensity and boldness; it is spectacular, and we are enchanted by the spectacle." Remembering Joel Snyder: read "'Las Meninas' and the Mirror of the Prince," Free Access on CI: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
"If This Be Magic evinces a welcome and wholly unsubtle cosmopolitanism which is also on show in Hahn’s treatment of English as a multipolar language." New in review, Chenxin Jiang on Daniel Hahn's If This Be Magic: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/chenxin_jian...
"The art of Rembrandt or Michelangelo can, for example, only be characterized by trying to qualify their position . . . outside the line of objectivism and subjectivism." Remembering Joel Snyder: Read "The Concept of Artistic Volition," Free Access on CI: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
"He apparently excused his own haughtiness and abuses in the name of poetry rooted in the blood and ashes of fascism." New in review, Bruce J. Krajewski on Anna Arno's Paul Celan: A Life, translated by Soren Gauger: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/bruce_j_kraj...
"There is something charming and yet nasty about the belief in the special relation of picture to world." Remembering Joel Snyder - From our Spring 1980 issue, read "Picturing Vision," Free Access at CI: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
"Colonizing Palestine . . . challenges the assumption that 1947–1948 is the starting point for Palestinian dispossession." New in review, Amahl Bishara reviews Areej Sabbagh-Khoury's Colonizing Palestine: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/amahl_bishar...
"Thus the photograph is not a substitute for vision, not even a modified or extended form of vision, but simply the inevitable outcome of a certain series of events." Remembering Joel Snyder: read "Photography, Vision, and Representation" Free Access: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
"We might wish to imagine the shape of things to come . . . but our own critical practices tell us that we can’t and with good reason." Remembering Joel Snyder (1940-2026): From our Winter 2004 issue, read "Notes from the Ground" Open Access: www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/...
"Seeing a body as a beacon, or a stone as a limit, means learning to see contiguity, paratactic besideness, as a form of semantic collapse." From our new issue, read Luke A. Fidler's "Paratactic Boundaries": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
"This value given by humans of all color and creed to human longevity could never be apprehended as merely ideological. This desire is now part of the human condition." From our new issue, read Dipesh Chakrabarty's "Questions Concerning Longevity": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
Summer is here! Read essays by Dipesh Chakrabarty, Luke A. Fidler, Tara Fickle, Alexander Freer, Hannah Cohen, Chris Reitz, Maurice Ebileeni, and critical responses from McKenzie Wark and Emily McAvan. criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/past_issues/...
"Failure, he claims, must be thought of as failure, not as a resting place on the way to success, not as a moral lesson, not as enlightenment." New in review, Jack Halberstam on Irving Goh's Living on After Failure: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/jack_halbers...
"The history of French Algerian liberalism provides a crucial and much‐neglected context for understanding Derrida's philosophy of deconstruction." From our Winter 2010 issue, read Edward Baring's "Liberalism and the Algerian War": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
"In order for the extermination of civilians to be validated as an atrocity, passive suffering had to be paired with indignation." New in review, Sayan Parial on Bruce Robbins's Atrocity: A Literary History: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/sayan_parial...
"The new forms were, to a great extent, brought into being through the frustration felt by generations of artists with the limitations of the depictive arts." From our Summer 2012 issue, read Jeff Wall's "Conceptual, Postconceptual, Nonconceptual": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
"A constant repositioning of what life could be—and the form it might take—is a feature in astrobiological discourse." From our Summer 2011 issue, read Stefan Helmreich's "What Was Life? Answers from Three Limit Biologies": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
"An Introduction to Contemporary Italian Thought . . . stands as a contribution to the field in its own right." New in review, Karl Baldacchino on Tim Christiaens, Joost de Bloois, and Stijn De Cauwer's An Introduction to Contemporary Italian Thought: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/karl_baldacc...
"The promise of instruments to register a reality that could not otherwise be known was central to the enterprise of psychic research in this period." From our Summer 2016 issue, read Jeremy Stolow's "Mediumnic Lights, Xx Rays, and the Spirit Who Photographed Herself":
"Alloa has gathered arrows launched into the future by other thinkers and artists, but he has also trimmed his own to let loose into the future of the humanities itself." New in review, Jae Emerling on Emmanuel Alloa's The Share of Perspective: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/jae_emerling...
RIP JOEL SNYDER (COEDITOR, CONTRIBUTOR, AND CONSULTING EDITOR)
"Everything that there is to know about an imaginary person is available in the literary corpus that produces and sustains the imaginary person." From our Autumn 2007 issue, read Candace Vogler's "The Moral of the Story": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
"How can one conceive of an image regime (an 'iconomy,' as Szendy has it), that not only decenters the human but is truly autonomous?" New in review, Kyle Sossamon on Peter Szendy's For an Ecology of Images, translated by Marco Roth: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/kyle_sossamo...
"For a photograph to be truly antitheatrical for Barthes it must somehow carry within it a kind of ontological guarantee that it was not intended to be so by the photographer." From our Spring 2005 issue, read Michael Fried's "Barthes’s Punctum": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
"Another Humanity is remarkable for its sustained passages of close reading, where Davis thinks with and against the critical theorists to envision decolonial approaches to humanism." New in review, Santasil Mallik on Benjamin P. Davis's Another Humanity: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/santasil_mal...
"What kinds of new soundscapes are created by acoustic technologies and how are they listened to, explored, and made sense of by scientists through the mediation of technology?" From our Winter 2009 issue, read Sophia Roosth's "Screaming Yeast": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....
"Alaimo’s exempla stretch across a fascinatingly heterogeneous array of genres, from photography and film to gallery and website exhibits to memoir, journalism, speculative fiction and much more." Lawrence Buell on Stacy Alaimo's The Abyss Stares Back: criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/lawrence_bue...
"Tobacco in 1604 embodies the interpretive response that Othello continues to elicit." From our Autumn 2003 issue, read Dennis Kezar's "Shakespeare’s Addictions": www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10....