Critical Inquiry

07/07/2025

" I started to explore wondering precisely out of frustration with the decisiveness that appeared in declarations of freedom written by the voluntarily childfree. Understanding these declarations and the critiques they engender better situates the effects of Motherhood’s verbal performance of wondering."

From our new issue, read Heather Houser's "White Women Wondering and the Contortions of Childfree Writing": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/735691

07/03/2025

"Immanent Critiques leverages Jay’s encyclopedic understanding of critical theory’s history against a set of pressing contemporary problems to unpack the tensions in both. Each essay reflects upon an irrevocable loss while resisting any facile effort to transform it into a point along the bending arc of the moral universe."

New in review, Alexei Procyshyn on Martin Jay's Immanent Critiques: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/alexei_procyshyn_reviews_immanent_critiques/

07/03/2025

"What makes the world worse today is that we cannot engage with the anticipatory emotion of hope." Read Ana Cecilia Dinerstein's "On Prefigurative Resistance, or How to Recover the Terrain of Hope" on the CI blog.

Ana Cecilia Dinerstein In March 2025, Franco “Bifo” Berardi published an intervention in In the Moment, where he addresses the question of subjectivity in a time of depression and panic. He asks: “…

06/30/2025

"The flow of data science into humanities and social science courses will also likely be inexorable—though less in the form of assigned readings about data science than of data practice facilitated by machine learning tools increasingly integrated with textual and other corpora."

From our new issue, read Alan Liu's "Data Science and the Post-Liberal Arts University": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/735621

06/27/2025

"Any reader will learn a great deal, about Spain and New Spain, translation and imitation, authority and imagination, whether or not they hold the walls of Thebes in mind."

New in review, Stephanie Burt on Leah Middlebrook's Amphion: Lyre, Poetry, and Politics in Modernity: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/stephanie_burt_reviews_amphion/

06/25/2025

Summer is here. With essays by Alan Liu, Heather Houser, Nick Salvato, Hannah Wiemer, Margaret Hillenbrand, and Eugenia Kelbert.

A journal of Art, Culture and Politics, Published by the University of Chicago

06/24/2025

"To get across a homily summarized in the film's title Griffith shows us four stories from four ages in human history. The idea of using multiple narratives to bring home a moral they have in common is not new in literature or film; what was new and unusual about Intolerance was that rather than present its stories one by one Griffith kept cross-cutting between the four."

From our Summer 2008 issue, read Yuri Tsivian's "'What Is Cinema?'": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/592543

06/16/2025

"One wouldn’t wish to go so far as to pronounce obsessive‐compulsive disorder (or OCD) trendy, but consider the evidence. Television’s latest Columbo manqué, Monk, is the very reverse of the schlep‐as‐genius; his moments of revelation—finding the bomb behind the painting because it keeps getting hung crookedly—are extensions of a will to straighten the entire world."

From our Autumn 2007 issue, read Jennifer L. Fleissner's "Obsessional Modernity": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/526089

06/13/2025

"Rather than focusing on the role of action or the vagaries of moral psychology, Ophuls creates worlds in which the very possibility for moral action is limited, constrained, even absent; he shows worlds defined by forms of ethical failure."

From our Autumn 2011 issue, read Daniel Morgan's "Max Ophuls and the Limits of Virtuosity": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/661646

06/12/2025

"In its twenty-one chapters that address a surprising panoply of panhuman phenomena like swimming, music, food, fasting, enjoying, complaining, and philosophizing (to name just some), Schuster develops an explosive and exploded reading of Kafka’s unfinished 1922 story 'Investigations of a Dog.'"

New in review, Frank Ruda on Aaron Schuster's How to Research Like a Dog: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/frank_ruda_reviews_how_to_research_like_a_dog/

06/09/2025

"During the torture scenes in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter, Magic Flute is being played on a gramophone. The images are not just antithetical to Mozart’s beautiful music or to Magic Flute’s enlightened sentiments. They corrupt the music, and will continue to do so long after the movie is over, because the beautiful music cannot assuage or erase the violence we see, and the violence, in memory, becomes a part of the music."

From our Spring 2004 issue, read Carolyn Abbate's "Music—Drastic or Gnostic?": https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/421160

06/06/2025

"It is rare to see a study equally versed in both Heideggerian and Oriental philosophy capable of cross-culturally tackling such difficult concepts—because they are deceptively similar—as Daoist emptiness, Buddhist sunyata, and Heidegger’s das Nichts."

New in review, Feng D**g on Eric S. Nelson's Heidegger and Dao: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/feng_dong_reviews_heidegger_and_dao/