At the January 2019 MLA convention in Chicago, I gave a paper entitled
“The pressure to intervene: A case for the modest (Young) Critic” on a panel
called Post-critique and the Profession. The purpose of the panel was to
encourage us to think about the postcritical debate in terms of the material
realities of literary studies today. My paper interrogated the recent call
for postcritical forms of scholarship from the perspective of the
humanities' current labor crisis. I had been struck by how arguments for
imagining alternatives to traditional hermeneutic modes of literary
criticism were inherently future-oriented: “this book joins an animated
conversation about the future of literary studies,” Rita Felski writes in
The Limits of Critique (2015 [10]). While
intrigued by her and others' encouragement to decenter critique and forge
other ways of engaging with our texts, I couldn't help thinking to myself,
“Wait; what future?” Though one might imagine that the target audience of
this plea for new kinds of criticism would be people like me—at the time a
graduate student trying to break into the profession—my future as an
academic was so terrifyingly uncertain that to plan for a future in which
I'd be able to do any form of scholarship, critical or otherwise, seemed
imprudent at best. To write about a postcritical future of literary studies
and to insufficiently address how grim the future looks to those of us who
hold the future of literary studies in our hands seemed a worrisome
oversight. In short, while arguments for postcritique, surface reading, and
the like seemed as if they should be talking to me, I couldn't help but
sense that they weren't really talking to me at all.
The Future of the Field: Highlighting Graduate Student Work in Ukrainian Studies
