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  • Editorial Remarks
  • Graham MacPhee

This issue of College Literature marks a transition point in the life of the journal, with the arrival of a new editor and editorial team, as well as incipient changes in visual style and composition. Such transitions often promise much—perhaps a privileged purchase on the 'new,' 'the contemporary,' or even the 'future'—although, if we are honest, they are possible and have meaning only in relation to what went before. It is appropriate, therefore, that I begin this new issue, albeit all too briefly, with heartfelt thanks to my predecessor as editor, Kostas Myrsiades, for all he has done to develop and build the journal. And a much wider debt of gratitude is owed to all the many others who have worked so hard over the years (and we hope will continue to work) to sustain the academic rigor of the journal and contribute to its intellectual growth.

Transitions promise so much because they allow us to imagine thinking and being differently. In that spirit, although in a rather more modest register, this issue announces a new editorial policy, as well as welcoming a number of new intellectual lights to our Editorial Board. We hope these initiatives will provide an invitation to a new range of contributors, as well as encouraging previous contributors, to engage with the texts and questions that seem most urgent, open, and productive in contemporary literary studies, wherever they may be located historically or geographically. Yet as valuable as the promise of transition may be, its allure may also occlude the ways in which it depends upon and is conditioned by the pasts it disavows. This [End Page vii] concern is all the more prevalent in the situation of the Western Anglophone academy, where in the humanities novelty and newness are privileged, a dynamic that leaves little time for reflecting on where we have been and how we got here.

To counter this forgetting, we have tried to register the doubleness of transition by adopting a new subtitle that reaches back to some of those pasts—so we have become College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies. 'Criticism,' or 'literary criticism,' was one of the ways in which styles of thinking and being were elaborated in the colonial situation, and through which class and gender hierarchies were reformed, reconstituted, and contested within the domestic polities of Europe and the United States. But 'critique' also has a difficult history that may be more instructive than we care to remember. Kant's claim that the critical tribunal of reason would supply "fundamental principles of its own institution, the authority of which no-one can question" prompted a century of contestation (Kant 1965, 601): from Hamann and Herder's critique that Kant had forgotten reason's instantiation in language, to critiques by Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche that reason's immersion in social institutions, economies, and structures of willing and desire would condition and limit the possibilities of critique.1 And these critiques have of course been radicalized in the century or so that has followed. One way to respond to this history might be simply to reject such notions of 'criticism' and 'critique,' as irretrievably bound up with discursive paradigms and technics of subjectivity and governmentality that we must somehow think outside of or beyond. But another approach might be to recollect and recognize the difficulty of this history, of the failure and vulnerability of reason and critique. On this view, we might begin to reconsider and revalue the claims for political, social, and economic justice bequeathed by the history of critique, while at the same remaining vigilant against the ways in which our own critical practice is shaped and conditioned by its social location and institutional embodiment.

For more than two decades, College Literature has been part of the wider movement to rethink and enlarge the disciplinary boundaries of literature and literary study. The journal can be proud of its track record of encouraging comparative and postcolonial understandings of literature and culture, concerns that anticipate contemporary interest in globalization and the transnational. College Literature has also been a pioneer in reflecting on the fact that intellectual frameworks are embodied institutionally and as...

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