Feeling Fallible, Being Wrong

This essay foregrounds the survival of literary criticism as a profession and argues that a lack of shared criteria in literary studies is not a problem to be solved but a condition that should provoke an openness to change, even if it often does the opposite. Beginning with recent debates over weak theory, postcritique, aesthetic judgment, and computational literary analysis, Maurice Lee brings a pragmatist approach to the crisis in the humanities—one that values pluralism, affect, fallibilism, and experimentation over epistemological certitude.