Criticism after Critique: Aesthetics, Literature, and the Political ed. by Jeffrey R. Di Leo (review)

Jeffrey Di Leo’s edited collection, Criticism after Critique, assembles a number of provocative essays under the very broad rubric of its title. Di Leo claims in his introductory remarks that “critique has become the modus operandi of the humanities,” and yet critique is not one thing (1). Di Leo marks out a narrative in which structuralist, deconstructionist, Marxist, and psychoanalytic critiques had their heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, while the 1990s brought the rise of postcolonial and queer critiques, and of cultural and media studies, which now, in turn, are—or might be—in “ruin” (2). If this narrative undergirds the series of questions Di Leo poses to his contributors, they nonetheless respond by offering a range of revisions to the narrative and by emphasizing quite different strands of critique and criticism under fire or in dialogue, separable or bound up inextricably with one another.

Indeed, David Shumway’s “Criticism and Critique: A Genealogy,” the first essay in the volume, rejects Di Leo’s premise of critique under attack: “While I acknowledge that the fashion in literary studies may be reverting to various apolitical concerns,” Shumway writes, “this trend is not the result of any attack on critique. It is not persuasion but habit that is at the root of these changes, and hence theoretical intervention is unlikely to have much impact” (15). By way of illustration, Shumway turns to Žižek—as an exception who actually does attack critique head-on, but who does not “actually want to abandon critique,” even though his “cynical reason” can give the impression “that we now live in a moment ‘after critique’” (16). (Žižek returns in the contributions by Christian Moraru, Nicole Simek, and Zahi Zalloua.) Concluding that literary scholars “cannot get beyond the reality that our project is defined by tensions between fact and value and criticism and critique,” Shumway predicts a continuing critical oscillation that never really leaves critique behind (23). Criticism after Critique thus goes too far as a title, though Di Leo’s subtitle, Aesthetics, Literature, and the Political, offers a useful schema for digesting the breadth of his contributors’ arguments.

Unlike Shumway’s genealogy, Allen Dunn’s “Who Killed Critique?” accepts at least the idea that “two types of literary criticism […] have challenged and, to some extent, already transformed critique as it is applied to literary texts” (157). Dunn identifies “halfhearted critique,” exemplified by Mark McGurl’s The Program Era [2011], as the less dramatic but likely more “consequential” of the two types (Jacques Rancière’s “anticritique” is the other), and his exposition of this halfheartedness is sharp: Halfhearted critique “provides a warrant for not taking the claims of the aesthetic seriously, for treating such claims as products of an anachronistic, enchanted world, but it does not authorize political judgment or offer much political insight” (162). Taking the aesthetic seriously emerges as a common end for most of this collection’s essays, and Di Leo might even have defined critique in these terms, as a set of threats to the possibility of aesthetic engagement and evaluation.

In perhaps the most far-reaching essay, “Appreciating Appreciation,” Charles Altieri lays out his idea that instead of distinguishing the sciences from the arts and the humanities (the last a term that “has no practical correlate,” Altieri notes) we might identify three interpretive practices: description, policy, and expressivity (46). After defining appreciation as “an effort to identify provisionally with the expressive agent so that one can imagine what it would be like to be involved in the forces and pressures that the work embodies,” Altieri proposes “the figure of the appreciator as providing a worthy counterpart to the figure of the knower” (50–51). With this gesture he offers one clear possibility for literary scholarship’s future without using the terms “criticism” or “critique” at all.

The eleven essays in Di Leo’s collection often fail, indeed, to speak in common...