Critical Inquiry

08/26/2025

"Here we have a cadaver, pensive at the chessboard, all organs on view. The plasticated cavalier on his plasticated steed. Rooms full of cadaver‐statues. Real body parts. Or almost real. Plasticated organs and corpses are odorless. Like the Cartesian body, they can be seen but not smelt."

From our Autumn 2007 issue, read Ian Hacking's "Our Neo‐Cartesian Bodies in Parts": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/526088

08/22/2025

"Le Festin de Pierre was censored twice, upon its initial staging and when the play finally appeared in print long after Molière’s death. The censorship of the published text reveals exactly which changes censors had demanded before they would allow the text to appear in print. (This is the only instance in Early Modern France in which the work of censorship can be reconstructed in such detailed fashion.)"

From our Autumn 2002 issue, read Joan DeJean's "The Work of Forgetting": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/367998

08/18/2025

"While legislators, along with most contemporaries, treated the East India Company as a single entity—a corporate body apparently so unified as to be regularly personified as John Company—in actuality, the company was composed of various individuals and interests, many of whom competed with each other."

From our Autumn 2004 issue, read Mary Poovey's "The Limits of the Universal Knowledge Project": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/427307

08/18/2025

Autumn 2025 issue coming soon!

08/15/2025

"The kiss of death is a modern form of the Judas kiss. The mafia capo kisses the subordinate or rival whom he marks for ex*****on. In an episode in The Simpsons, Big Tony kisses a character and tells him to transmit that kiss as a gift to another character, who is horrified to receive the relayed kiss because he knows it is the kiss of death."

From our Spring 2005 issue, read J. Hillis Miller's "What Is a Kiss?": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/430992

08/14/2025

"Williams argues that reparative policies must directly acknowledge historical injustices and explicitly address contemporary inequities. His proposed policies—such as baby bonds, targeted asset-building initiatives, and radical inheritance tax reform—are not merely technocratic solutions but moral imperatives rooted in historical redress and structural justice."

New in review, Zheng Wang on Robert B. Williams's Funding White Supremacy: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/zheng_wang_reviews_funding_white_supremacy/

08/08/2025

"The more historically conscious and historically articulate the mature Mendelssohn becomes, the more the confessional vicissitudes and nuances that form the origins of his early nineteenth-century predicament enter into his musical and textual discourses. The Erste Walpurgisnacht (1831) and the incidental music to Antigone (1841) invoke explicitly the tensions between archaic religion and modern practice and norms."

From our Winter 2014 Issue, read Michael P. Steinberg's "Music and Melancholy": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/674116

08/07/2025

"Through close readings of Emily Brontë, George Eliot, and others, the book challenges its readers to immerse themselves in the 'fossil-fueled lifeworld' of the nineteenth century. But just as we might acclimate to one line in a late poem by Christina Rossetti, Hensley wrenches us back into the futility of present 'solutionist' rhetorics of individual actions aimed at '"beating" mass extinction.'"

New in review, Karen Pinkus on Nathan K. Hensley's Action without Hope: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/karen_pinkus_reviews_action_without_hope/

08/05/2025

"The combined impact of these changes—declining economic and social institutions and the failure of political institutions—on the residents of poor inner-city neighborhoods is fully captured in The Wire's portrayal of systemic urban inequality."

From our Autumn 2011 issue, read Anmol Chaddha and William Julius Wilson's "'Way Down in the Hole'": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/661647

08/04/2025

CI remembers Raymond Saunders (1934-2025).

Bill Brown Raymond Saunders sure is having a moment. At the age of ninety-one. Last year, two Manhattan galleries, David Zwirner and Andrew Kreps, jointly exhibited Raymond Saunders: Post No Bills.…

08/01/2025

"During the First World War, films, postcards, posters, and the illustrated press created an unparalleled concentration of the visual media; in 1917 the head of the German army, General Ludendorff, ordered 700 cinemas to be built along the frontlines, as 'the war has demonstrated the overwhelming power of images and the film as a form of reconnaissance and influence.'"

From our Spring 2003 issue, read Horst Bredekamp's "A Neglected Tradition?": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/376303

07/31/2025

"He illuminates our understanding of books, libraries, and learning in early modernity, the historical epoch under examination, whilst also directing 'a critical gaze at our own day-to-day practice of scholarly work' in twenty-first-century academia."

New in review, Andreas Tranvik on Andrew Hui's The Study: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/andreas_tranvik_reviews_the_study/