Prospective criticism

Waxing about the futures of criticism endogenously clangs hollow in the midst of exogenous omnicrisis. Instead of worrying about the next big thing in literary studies, this essay suggests, we should be asking if there are particular tools that criticism offers that may allow us to transform the conditions of criticism’s demise. This essay offers two possible answers: ‘objectivity’, defined as a form of thought and knowledge particular to both criticism and literature, and ‘composition’, the critical understanding of the constructive function of ideas and forms. This essay deploys these concepts in an argument for the need of critics to recognise and put to work their common work and visions together with other publics whose survival is at stake in the destruction of the university, the enclosure of reason and reflection, and the rendering disposable of ever wider swathes of humanity. The question of how we make critical arguments emerges here as a crucial aspect of the ways in which critics and their ideas are able to engage with the foundational questions of their work precisely by aligning it with wider publics and thus by probing their function as a public good and for public interest

Aesthetics · Art · Criticism · Literature · Sociology · Critical Theory and Philosophy · Ethics, Aesthetics, and Art · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · History

• Art Is for Everybody

  Bradley J Fest•boundary 2•2026

  Add to list