It is notable that Pardis Dabashi's paper at the 2019 MLA convention,
“the pressure to intervene: A case for the modest (Young) Critic,” caused
such a stir—insofar as it mounted a gentle argument against ritual
stir-causing, and the gentleness of the argument was central to its point.
As Dabashi wrote, “the language of the scholarly intervention—that is, the
articulation of the stakes of one's argument—has a way of ossifying hunches
into convictions” (4). The idea, clearly, was to ratchet down the level of
agon and hubris in scholarly debate and to foreground the perspectives of
younger scholars making their first forays into the fray: “since thus far
the post-critical debates held in widely circulated and visible academic
forums have mostly been conducted among professionally secure, mid-late
career scholars, we've not yet had the chance to discuss the kind of
epistemic modesty that matters very deeply to early-career-stage scholars
now, that is, scholars entering graduate programs in or around 2008” (2).
Dabashi suspects, at least as this professionally secure, mid-to-late-career
scholar hears her, that the cohort entering the desiccated post-2008 (and
especially post-2015) job market does not see the profession in the terms
that have dominated debate about the purpose of criticism over the past ten
or twelve years:
The field of critical production for us is deeply heterogenous,
syncretic: the mixing of critical and (at least some) postcritical
methods has become something we take for granted. And early-career
scholars of this generation—who don't really have a horse in the
race of re-orientating ourselves vis-à-vis the text—would advocate
instead, it seems to me, for re-orienting ourselves vis-à-vis each
other—that is, laterally, scholar to scholar. (3)