Project MUSE®: Criticism - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/40
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Criticism.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 43 (2001) through current issueLatest Articles: CriticismTWOProject MUSE®Criticism1536-03420011-1589Latest articles in Criticism. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Fluid Life and Sympoietic Death: The Posthuman Perspective in Korean Sci-Fi
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/967972
<p></p>
As the narrative of the apocalypse and the fantasy of technological immortality simultaneously descend on us, we are compelled to reconsider: What does life depend on for its continuation? Or rather, does life need to exist forever? Is death truly the end of life? In Donna Haraway's concept of the Chthulucene, she proposes that the human and nonhuman, life and death, are no longer oppositional but sympoietic.1 "Living-with and dying-with each other potently in the Chthulucene can be a fierce reply to the dictates of both Anthropos and Capital."2 This posthumanist perspective pushes us to rethink humanity's place within complex ecosystems and to reconsider how life and death are mutually constituted, interconnected
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/967978">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/40/image/coversmallFluid Life and Sympoietic Death: The Posthuman Perspective in Korean Sci-Fi2025-08-26text/htmlen-USFluid Life and Sympoietic Death: The Posthuman Perspective in Korean Sci-Fi2025-08-262025TWOProject MUSE®705082026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-26Woman-Thinking in the Dark Core: Life otherwise and the Community to Come
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/967973
<p></p>
In Virginia Woolf's 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Ramsay, matriarch to the Ramsay family and their variegated group of artists and philosophers vacationing together on the Scottish coast, manages to steal a moment of solitary reflection from the bustle of childcare, mealtimes, and spousal disputes. With the children in bed, "[s]he could be herself, by herself."1 The work of playing hostess, mother, wife, and matchmaker set aside, "one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/967978">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/40/image/coversmallWoman-Thinking in the Dark Core: Life otherwise and the Community to Come2025-08-26text/htmlen-USWoman-Thinking in the Dark Core: Life otherwise and the Community to Come2025-08-262025TWOProject MUSE®1017312026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-26"An Array of Facts": Anti-Lynching Literature and Bibliographic Control
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/967974
<p></p>
The facts contended for will always appear manifest.No other record has had a more durable or indelible imprint on the cultural imagination of lynching than "Strange Fruit." Made famous by Billie Holiday's 1939 recording, Abel Meeropol's lyrics ironize "the gallant South" by juxtaposing an iconic "pastoral scene" with stark images of the "strange and bitter crop" of Black bodies borne by Southern trees. The song serves as a powerful index to the popular imagination because it is both symptomatic and productive of mainstream understandings of lynching. It locates lynching as a phenomenon geographically specific to the South, then naturalizes it, albeit sardonically, as a form of agriculture divorced from modern
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/967978">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/40/image/coversmall"An Array of Facts": Anti-Lynching Literature and Bibliographic Control2025-08-26text/htmlen-US"An Array of Facts": Anti-Lynching Literature and Bibliographic Control2025-08-262025TWOProject MUSE®1133422026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-26Challenging the Operations of Power in the Pandemic Plot: A Hydrofeminist Reading of Water in Sarah Hall's Burntcoat
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/967975
<p></p>
Sarah Hall's Burntcoat, written during the COVID-19 pandemic and published in 2021, represents a significant contribution to the expanding body of pandemic literature. Historically, works like Albert Camus's The Plague have employed the motif of disease to explore societal collapse, moral dilemmas, and human resilience—ideas that resonated among readers during the COVID-19 pandemic.1 In the pandemic's aftermath, the genre of "corona fictions" has flourished, with authors worldwide investigating the multifaceted impact of the outbreak. Publications about such literature have emphasized themes such as human connection, dystopian aesthetics, and the varied responses of protagonists to crises.2 Resources like the
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/967978">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/40/image/coversmallChallenging the Operations of Power in the Pandemic Plot: A Hydrofeminist Reading of Water in Sarah Hall's Burntcoat2025-08-26text/htmlen-USChallenging the Operations of Power in the Pandemic Plot: A Hydrofeminist Reading of Water in Sarah Hall's Burntcoat2025-08-262025TWOProject MUSE®1131672026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-26On The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/967976
<p></p>
In February 1977, June Jordan and Alice Walker convened a group of Black women writers in Jordan's Brooklyn apartment to eat, drink, and talk about their work. The group, who called themselves the Sisterhood, included now-famous authors Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Ntozake Shange, Vertamae Grosvenor, Paule Marshall, Patricia Spears Jones, and Margo Jefferson. It also counted among its members women who may be less widely known but who were influential in fields such as children's literature, magazine editing, dance criticism, African American studies, and theology. They included dance critic Zita Allen; journalist and editor Audreen Ballard; writer and minister Rosemary Bray; journalist, author, and editor Audrey
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/967978">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/40/image/coversmallOn The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture2025-08-26text/htmlen-USOn The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture2025-08-262025TWOProject MUSE®196062026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-26On Petrochemical Fantasies: The Art and Energy of American Comics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/967977
<p></p>
Where is the great American oil comic? For something so pervasive in American life, and indeed for most humans, it is surprising that so many of the most well-known comic books in the Anglo-American tradition, to say nothing of global comics, are often more about imagined freedom from petrochemicals than actual dependence on them. (In this way, American comics are not unlike American novels, about which Amitav Ghosh once famously pointed out the absence of the "oil encounter" as a significant theme.) Yet, as Daniel Worden argues in his utterly convincing monograph, Petrochemical Fantasies: The Art and Energy of American Comics, oil and other fossil fuels have been central presences in American comics from at least
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/967978">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/40/image/coversmallOn Petrochemical Fantasies: The Art and Energy of American Comics2025-08-26text/htmlen-USOn Petrochemical Fantasies: The Art and Energy of American Comics2025-08-262025TWOProject MUSE®131562026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-26On Metamodernism and the Postdigital in the Contemporary Novel
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/967978
<p></p>
From the rise of the internet to social media platforms and artificial intelligence, digital technologies have affected fundamental changes in our societies and cultures over the last couple of decades. However, human experience, and along with it, literature and the arts, have always been entangled in with both technological and societal upheavals and innovations, and this is one of the major strands Spencer Jordan traces in his book Metamodernism and the Postdigital in the Contemporary Novel. Through detailed discussion of the continuum from literary modernism and postmodernism to metamodernism and careful close readings that draw on a comprehensive selection of authors and novels, Jordan argues for placing new
... <a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/article/967978">Read More</a>
Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/40/image/coversmallOn Metamodernism and the Postdigital in the Contemporary Novel2025-08-26text/htmlen-USOn Metamodernism and the Postdigital in the Contemporary Novel2025-08-262025TWOProject MUSE®106662026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-08-26