If postmodern literature reveals the constructed nature of our general categories, then what are the particulars out of which those general categories are constructed?

In 2001, when Bill Brown published his essay on “Thing Theory,” it seemed that scholars were tired of subjects. But now, nearly two decades later, one must wonder if we’ve also grown tired of things.

There has been a noticeable doubling down on critique in African American literary studies. But postcritique is thriving in less-recognized work in the field: namely, scholarship that is oriented around empirical analysis of textual objects and that is animated by theoretical and practical reflection on archival research.

Via a reading of two fictional dialogues by Bruno Latour, Dalglish Chew suggests how generational structures of transmission inflect our attachments to critique, and thus also our understanding of its alternatives.

By granting that aesthetic surfaces speak in a different language than literary criticism, post-critical reading permits us to broaden the aesthetic forms that count as “critical” and the ways in which critique functions through aesthetic form. Tyler Bradway calls for new grammars of aesthetic agency, ones that more expansively account for the critical and creative forces that aesthetic objects harness to press back against the impasses of their contemporary moment.